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OpenVMS Technical Update

The first technical session at this week's HP World 2003 was certainly interesting. There were enough new features to keep the presentation going for well over it's allotted 75 minutes.

Greg Jordan and Andy Schneider talked about the technical road map for OpenVMS at length.

Some of the highlights I have touched on here before include

• dissimilar device types allowed in HBVS
• dynamic volume expansion

Some of the other things mentioned were:

• XP Storage Arrays are being qualified for support at the moment
• CASA support will be available next year
• Marvel (EV7) will support mixed speed CPUs
• SET PROCESS/UNITS will allow you to view storage and memory sizes in blocks or bytes
• The DCL command buffer has been expanded to 4K characters
• BACKUP/HEADER_ONLY will prevent backup from unshelving files that have been moved to nearline storage
• Fastpath support for LAN devices, including PEDRIVER
• The tradeoff that systems managers had to make between BALSETCNT and WSMAX has been eliminated by moving working set lists to S2 space
• Mount verify "noise" experienced in large fibrechannel storage installations has been suppressed
• The performance data collecter (TDC) is getting new features
• Performance improvements to the TCP/IP stack

and many more too numerous to mention.