VMS SERVICES

CERN VMS Services

CERN is 'rightsizing' their VMS cluster to eliminate their VAX 9000 with its HSC and RA90 disks. They are being replaced with 72 GB of SCSI disk in a DEC Storageworks cabinet and three Alpha workstations. The use of individual Alpha workstations will allow them to scale the cluster size up or down in future as appropriate. Three FTE's support the two VMS clusters, VXCERN and VXENG. CERN is happy with their Alpha 7000, finding it very reliable and easy to manage.

They found that Alphas behave well with 128 MB of memory, allowing them to support at least 75-100 interactive users per alpha with no noticeable loss of response.

Access to tapes is via network copying from the SHIFT (UNIX) farm: tape requests go via the TPREAD utility to the SHIFT machines which copy the tape to VMS disk using CERN's RFIO package and an FDDI network. Access to tapes are provided throught the channel-connected rs6000's already in use with the SHIFT farm. This system appears to be portable and could be used at SLAC.

CERN plans to continue to operate their central VMS cluster until a year after LEP experiments are terminated (appproximately the year 2000). They do not believe thee DEC support for VMS will be a problem on this time scale.

CERN has written a utility, called SPACE, to aid in the management of disk space within a group. It provides an easy way to transfer disk quotas between users within the group without having to provide system privileges to the space administrators. This should be investigated for applicability at SLD.

DSNLINK is used to get DEC code fixes online.

A VMS users' guide has been written.

Other HEP sites are saving large amounts of DEC software maintenance fees since DEC makes them eligible for their campus software license agreement. SLAC spends on the order of $240,000 annually on software updates for Ultrix and primarily VMS. The Stanford Educational Software License fee could be shared (like the Sun VolumePac, Transarc, and Oracle site license agreements) for probably $40,000/year or, worst case, SLAC could have its own ESL (like the IBM HESC) for about $80,000/year.

DESY VMS Services

DESY are in the final stages of adding 4 Alpha AXP3000-500's workstations to their VAX cluster. Once these are fully commissioned they will remove their VAX 9000 and the associated HSC's and disks. They will use a GigaSwitch to ensuring good connectivity between the workstations in the VAX cluster. DESY has no timetable for phasing out VMS support. (DESY currently supports up to 250 simultaneous users on their VAX 9000, and have not seem problems).

DESY will use CERN's RFIO and SHIFT tape staging techniques to get tape access to the VMS cluster. DESY has a well layed out network arrangement that provides access from the VMS clutser's Gigaswitch to tape through a Gigarouter (from a company called NetStar). This GigaRouter also forms the hub of their Unix cluster, connecting to their SGI challenges using HIPPI.

They warned us VMS 6.1 will be the last version of the O/S to support DECNET Phase IV.

RAL VMS Services

RAL are upgrading their VMS services by introducing two DEC Alpha 7000's one with 3 cpus and 756MB and one with 1 cpu and 512MB. These machines will be upgraded to higher speeds (180MHz to 200MHz in Jan-94 and to 275MHz later in 1994). They will include access to 100GB of disk via a DEC StorageWorks system. RAL considers the multiprocessor Alpha 7000 to be a very efficient, easy to administer way to couple cpus together.

RAL will keep at least one VAX running VMS for legacy VMS applications that may not be ported to Open VMS.

DEC won the hardware and software maintenance contract for RAL. RAL is eligible for the very attractive DEC campus agreement for software.