DEC will finally unveil its Galaxy clustering software for OpenVMS at its Decus user meet in Annaheim, California this week for tying together up to 32 eight-way servers, supporting up to a terabyte of shared memory and 200 input/output devices. It claims Galaxy will push 300,000 transactions per second over Memory Channel interconnects, rising to over one million transactions when it gets the stuff optimized and running on larger configurations and wider interconnects. Although DEC will show Galaxy working on DEC Unix and Windows NT as well as OpenVMS, it stresses the software is intended primarily for its OpenVMS users. It won’t become available for about a year when it ships in a new version of OpenVMS. It performs automatic load balancing between nodes and will also support older OpenVMS releases in mixed node configurations. Currently at release 7.1, DEC swears the notion of putting OpenVMS on Intel Corp architecture is back on the table again with the Intel Corp settlement following two earlier rejections of the port in 1988 and 1994 (CI No 3,280). It says it’ll take a while to sort through IA-64 in enough detail to figure out how to do the port, but admits OpenVMS-on-Intel would be a desirable and significant piece of software real estate. The first attempt to put VMS on Intel is rumoured to have been killed by research and advanced development chief Bob Supnik as a slap to Dave Cutler who had jumped ship to Microsoft Corp to become Windows NT meister. The second feasibility study reeled in a Gartner Group affinity strategy which became DEC’s OpenVMS-NT integration programme of the same name. DEC has a shrinking, but very valuable installed base of 434,000 OpenVMS sites. Affinity Wave 5, also to be announced this week, includes Java development kit on OpenVMS, additional file sharing and data storage facilities between OpenVMS and NT, plus enhanced email, internet and web functions. The idea is to provide seamless integration between OpenVMS and NT in mixed enterprise environments.
