Appendix C: Assessing OpenVMS and Linux: The Right Tool for the Right Job

By John Robert Wisniewski

Good, Better, Best

Welcome to the book that answers the questions why OpenVMS? Linux? and just how do you get these two computer operating systems (OSs) to work together?

Why in the world would you want to have them work together? Let me try to answer that by briefly saying that there are customers who adore OpenVMS—its cluster technology and full-service support. Linux is into Open Source, with tens of thousands of coders in its court. What a wild duet! But still, they're cousins—open systems cousins.

Now, without singing the rest of the Patty Duke theme music; the two operating systems have much in common: their network interface protocols; Open Source tools; industry standards; commercial database products; X Windows; and industry-standard security tools for encryption, tunneling, and secure communications. If general tools are on both Linux and OpenVMS, why continue to use two different OSs? Simply because OpenVMS has features and abilities that Linux or any other OS would be hard pressed to deliver.

What does OpenVMS have? OpenVMS provides something that you only get with 25 years of testing and use—enterprise-class stability and reliability in almost every configuration it's used in.

What does Linux bring to the table? Today Linux is Open Source, with thousands of programmers working on new and exciting applications worldwide, sharing base source codes, and delivering low-cost tools and software that improve the entire software industry.

Together, OpenVMS and Linux provide the best of Open Source and the best of commercial applications, giving users a choice about how to deploy various computing styles: client/server, multitiered database servers, or large transaction processing environments.

Between the high end and the low end of computing, various demployment strategies are needed today and will be needed in the future. The line between OpenVMS and Linux deployment decisions should be drawn wherever it needs to be.

Solution architects and system analysts need to understand the best features of both operating systems, as well as their realistic limits, and then measure the actual cost of deployment of Linux and OpenVMS systems, utilizing the best tools for the system or work at hand. OpenVMS can run on workstations to mainframes. Linux runs on mainframes to workstations, drawing a hard line in the sand that limits what will be deployed and limits the types of deployment an organization can deliver. Why not use the best of both worlds to solve computing problems? I know I do!