OpenVMS Month!

February is the OpenVMS Month. The people of VMSblog have launched a “Call for Participation in the OpenVMS Month”, the event is sponsored by Connect and there will be presentations, webinars.  These are great news for me, I like OpenVMS since the very first time I worked with it more than a decade ago. It is robust, reliable and secure.

For those of you who are asking if OpenVMS is still alive, the answer is Yes! OpenVMS is alive and much more, it has been ported to the Itanium platform and currently support the latest Itanium processor revisions, it runs on a wide variety of Integrity servers ranging from rx2660 to Superdome SD64B and even Integrity Blades, it’s actively marketed and fully supported by HP on Itanium and Alpha platforms and the support for VAX platforms will last until 2012, it’s going to be supported as guest OS on IVM in the near future and many HP technologies are already ported or will be in the next years.

The official roadmap can be reviewed here.

If you want to give OpenVMS a try here are a some resources to start.

• HP OpenVM site.
• OpenVMS documentation.
• OpenVMS Community Portal, along with the OpenVMS Hobbyist Portal they are the best non-HP resources for OpenVMS.
• The OpenVMS Hobbyist Portal it has a small but great list of links regarding OpenVMS, information about emulators, white papers, software downloads and the famous OpenVMS Hobbyist Kits for sale, ther are Alpha and a VAX versions for $30 each shipping included.
• There is also an OpenVMS forum at ITRC.

Apart from those links David Douthitt has written today an entry in his blog Unix Administratosphere about Alpha emulators, all of them capable of running OpenVMS, a great starting point to any newcomer.

So what are you waiting for? Grab your copy of OpenVMS and spread the word :-)

Juanma.