10 year uptime of VMS cluster for Amsterdam Police

[Jan van den Ende]

Yes,
it is due 13 april, at 09:35:50 GMT.

I have had requests for an e-mail address or other mechanism to vonvey congrats.

Since the entire police network is behind rather strict firewalls, we have chosen for a dual mechanism, where I will do the coordination.

On our inTRAnet we will have a page, sporting all (acceptable) messages.
It will be organised by sender's country.

First, if you want to "make it to the list", the following rules will have to be obeyed.

1. Just PLAIN ASCII text, either as the mail body, or as an attachment, an then _ONLY_ of filetype ".TXT"
Any images, executables, control characters etc, and the filters will simply throw the entire mail into the bit bucket (no bouncing), and if many of those arrive, _I_ will get blamed.

2. (in view of the planned ordering) any acceptable message _MUST_ contain your country.

3. Any message must be in Dutch or in English; or contain a literal translation in one of those.

Of course, your personal name is much appriciated, and if you can (and may) add your company name (maybe job title); GREAT!

--------

If you allow "the world" to see your message, post it as a reply in this thread. (I will have to transfer those to the Intranet site, so please, JUST a reply, NO attachments)

If you want your message to be "police eyes only", them e-mail it to

openvms (at) amsterdam (dot) politie (dot) nl

I have to ask you to NOT do both: choose one method.

Current planning is that messages that have arrived before april 12, 10:00 AM GMT get included in the actual intranet congrats page on display at the Moment Supreme.

And now it just remains to invite you to join (in only virtually) in the celebration.

Proost.

Have one on me.

jpe

[Ian Miller. · Accepted solution]

The significance of this achievement for me is not the 10 years uptime but maintaining 100% application availability for 10 years while replacing all the hardware and relocating the systems. This demonstrates world class system management discipline as well as the excellence of the underlying platform that you use.

Congratulations to you and the team!

I encourage you to write a book or at least an article for the VTJ documenting how you did it so we can all learn.

[Ian Miller.]

for people unfamiliar with this cluster see

http://www.openvms.org/stories.php?story=03/11/28/7758863
and
http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1019391


The VMS cluster uptime record is held by the the WVNET cluster which celerbrated 10 years
in January 2006.

[Jan van den Ende]

Ian,

thanks for your reaction,

all others: allow me to re-state my rules for this thread:

(they are to make my work easier in constructing the Intranet congrats register)

- Please STATE YOUR CONTRY (and any other profile info that may be used) __inside__ your reply.
I intend to categorize by contry.

I know it is available through your "My Profile", but I expect to have to process most of this last-minute, and I probably will have little time to do it.

---
points assignment for this thread will be after the actual milestone.
----
typo in original post: between the parenthesis in the last line it should say:

if only virtually

Proost.

Have one on me.

jpe

[Anton van Ruitenbeek]

Hey guys,

Here another supporter of this system.
I do realy congratuale you all there, I know I'm one of the architects and writers of the management routines and all hardware related on this cluster.

Anton van Ruitenbeek (AvR)
The Netherlands

[Jan van den Ende]

I would like to present messages from as many countries as possible, so, if your contry is not yet listed, consider that an extra invitation to react!

Proost.

Have one on me.

jpe

[Verne Britton]

JPE, here is my posting:


--------------------------------------------

Please accept my congratulations on reaching your cluster uptime milestone ... GREAT WORK.

As a co-worker of the system manager of the WVNET cluster, I know first-hand how hard it can be to keep a cluster up for such a long time.

Again you and all your team have done a magnificent job (as others have said) during your various hardware upgrades and relocations.

Verne Britton
Lead Systems Programmer
WVNET
West Virginia, USA

--------------------------------------------

end of posting


Verne

[Jan van den Ende]

Verne,

for the obvious reason I am especially pleased by YOUR congrats!

And that also gives me the opportunity to reciproke congrats to YOU and YOUR TEAM on your achievement (as I am not aware of any earlier occasion to do so).

Proost.

Have one on me.

jpe

[Ron Kaledas]

Jan -

Congrats on your 10 year cluster uptime! Of course, we all know VMS is the best operating system on the planet, but we also know it takes good people to keep it going through all of the events that can happen, like moves and power problems and such.

Great to hear it! Keep it going!

Ron Kaledas
Detroit, Michigan, USA

[Steven E. Protter]

Congrats,

Have one on me.

Shmuel Protter
Unix Systems Administrator
NDS LTD Israel
Jerusalem, ISRAEL

[John Travell]

Not a single second during all of ten years when your application was unavailable for use, even through relocation to a different town ?
That deserves more than just credit due to effective management, it truly warrants global publicity, most especially to those who make the strategic decisions in public and commercial organisations.
Has any other platform ever come even close to achieving this ? I suspect probably not.
OpenVMS for ever... :-)

John Travell,
Independent VMS support,
Hampshire, UK.

[Volker Halle]

Jan,

congratulations for this fantastic uptime of your OpenVMS cluster.

OpenVMS - when downtime in not an option.

Volker Halle
Invenate GmbH
Hannover, Germany

[VK2COT]

Hello,

Sincere congratulations!

This is what computing business should
be about.

Good solutions should never be be based
on reboots :)

My first four years in IT were devoted to VMS from 1986 to 1990 (PDP-11, MicroVaxen, Vax 750, 780 and similar).

Digital Equipment Corporation provided excellent support at the time.

Whilst I love Unix and Linux (dealing with thme for the last 22 years), I still have
very fond memories of VMS.

You are in Amsterdam, so good beer should
not be a problem to find :) Enjoy the
celebration.

VK2COT (Sydney - Australia)

[Sunny Jaisinghani]

Hello

Hearty Congratualations.

Though i am a fresher in HP-UX and not well versed with the clustering environment i can understand what a great achievement this is.

Keep up the good work.

Sunny Jaisinghani
India, Mumbai

[Martin Hughes]

Congratulations to the architects and administrators responsible for this achievement. It must be especially satisfying to be able to serve the VMS community by generating such good publicity for OpenVMS.

Congratulations also to the Amsterdam Police for making such a sound investment.

Martin Hughes
VMS Systems Administrator
Sydney Australia

[Matti_Kurkela]

Congratulations for everyone responsible for the design, building, administration and maintenance of your cluster!

To get a system that can work continuously for years, you need a system that is prepared to handle all kinds of failures. It is not something you can really add into the system by just installing some magic product: it must be taken into account at every level, from the fundamentals of server room environment to the internals of the application software and administration procedures.

Your people have obviously understood that and made it a reality. The results speak for themselves.

Matti Kurkela
HP-UX/Linux sysadmin
Finland

[Jan van den Ende]

What other score than 10 points could be possible for 10 years?

Going into the celebration now.

Your congrats form part of the presentation.

Proost.

Have one on me.

jpe

[H_Bachner]

Congratulations to the team that kept the cluster up and running continuously for 10 years; congratulations to the Amsterdam Police which selected the very best technology to achieve this, and just received another confirmation that their choice was absolutely right; and of course congratulations also to the OpenVMS engineers for this excellent showcase of what this OS is capable of.

This entry comes after the cutoff date Jan set in his original posting, but I didn't want to give Murphy a chance :-)

Happy celebrations,
Hans.

[Wouter Jagers]

Same here.. I wouldn't want my message to jinx the ten-year-thing ;-)

Congratulations to all people involved on this outstanding achievement !

The knowledge that this application has been up continuously since I started my career in IT adds a surrealistic touch.

Big raise for everyone ! Keep up the great work.

Cheers,

Wouter Jagers
Uptime Technologies

[Vladimir Fabecic]

Congratulations to the team that kept the cluster up and running continuously for 10 years!!!
I wanted to post my congrats after the cutoff date, so I am doing it now.
Also hope someone from HP management saw this great achievement !

VMS is the best!!!!!!!

[Robert Gezelter]

Jan,

I must register a protest (smile).

It is bad luck to congratulate someone BEFORE their birthday.

Now that the cluster HAS celebrated its anniversary, I feel free to say:

"Congratulations to the entire team on achieving this milestone (kilometer? stone). This anniversary is not only a tribute to OpenVMS, but a compliment to the discipline of the systems management team that made it happen. It is a worthy example of what is needed in this 24x7, constantly online world."

- Bob Gezelter, http://www.rlgsc.com

[Jan van den Ende]

Hans, Wouter, Vladimir, Bob,

I must admit that I am sensitive to your feelings. I will just re-open this thread.

However, as info for all others, the OpenVMS at amsterdam dot politie dot nl email account has no validity anymore.

Vladimir:
>>>
Also hope someone from HP management saw this great achievement !
<<<

Well, we were really greatly honoured by the presence of Sue Skonetski herself!

Await the upcoming photos from her, and me, and maybe others. (Sue is now going to the German Decus, so allow some time, please).

Proost.

Have one on me.

jpe

[Ian Miller.]

I hope Sue gets this information in front of Martin Fink or higher people at HP.

[Kris Clippeleyr]

Jan (and colleagues)
Congratulations from Flanders on reaching this remarkable milestone.
It's indeed an achievement.
I'll buy you one in Nashua.
CU there,
Kris (aka Qkcl)

[Wim Van den Wyngaert]

The new milestone is 20 years. April 13 2017.
Hope we stay alive till then ...

Congrats Jan

Wim