OpenVMS Technical Journal V8, June 2006

This OpenVMS Technical Journal from June 2006 features several articles covering advancements and applications of the OpenVMS operating system.

One article details a Disaster Tolerance Proof of Concept, demonstrating that HP Volume Shadowing for OpenVMS and Oracle9i RAC can provide high availability and data integrity over extended distances (up to 1000 km). Testing showed successful operation across various distances, with Host-Based Minimerge (HBMM) proving efficient for recovery.

Another piece discusses Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) Strategies on OpenVMS, focusing on managing data based on its access value (speed of retrieval) and retention/restore value (how long it must be saved). It categorizes storage into online, near-line, and off-line, and outlines how HP's Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) and Archive Backup System (ABS) products can be used to implement ILM policies, emphasizing proactive management and recovery testing.

System Service Interception (SSI) is explored as a mechanism that allows user-specified code to run before, after, or in place of system services on OpenVMS Alpha and I64 platforms. This capability is used for debugging, memory analysis, and optimizing file operations, with distinct implementation details for each architecture.

The journal also includes an article on managing AlphaServer consoles, explaining how to access and retrieve console environment variables from the System Reference Manual (SRM) console. It covers various methods, including direct console access, system functions like getsysinfo() and f$getenv(), and HP tools such as sys_check and VMS_Check.

Performance benchmarks for the CHARON-VAX emulator are presented, comparing its performance against native OpenVMS hardware. The emulator, running on Windows servers, showed impressive results under stress testing, particularly in enhanced modes.

A significant article introduces HP PERFDAT, a new performance and capacity planning solution for OpenVMS. This tool offers automated, high-resolution data collection, filtering, charting, and trend analysis, providing deep insights into multi-system performance without requiring extensive OpenVMS internal knowledge. Its architecture includes a data collector, SNMP extension, distributed database, and a powerful Data Query Language (DQL) with a graphical user interface (GUI).

Finally, an article titled "Bringing Vegan Recipes to the Web with OpenVMS" describes a practical project to migrate a vegan recipe database from a Linux/MySQL environment to an OpenVMS VAX system using RDB. The author details the challenges of porting and performance tuning, ultimately achieving comparable or superior performance through the use of the WASD web server with CGIplus/RTE and a Perl-based caching proxy for RDB access.