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Compaq Brings NT, OpenVMS Closer

Compaq Computer Corp. announced Affinity Wave 6, the Windows NT and OpenVMS integration program started by Digital Equipment Corp.

"We are moving forward with both Digital Unix and OpenVMS," says Rich Marcello, vice president of OpenVMS, Compaq. "Our goal is to work with Microsoft to enhance NT so it becomes more enterprise-capable. This is part of the same strategic roadmap we recently announced with Microsoft regarding Digital Unix."

As part of Wave 6, Compaq announced the OpenVMS Galaxy software architecture, enhancements to its OpenVMS operating system, and COM for OpenVMS. These are joined by 19 new products and services designed to provide a new and advanced level of application integration between OpenVMS and Windows NT.

The most important of these, in terms of interoperability with Windows NT, is COM for OpenVMS. This is a new implementation of Microsoft’s COM object technology on OpenVMS for secure distributed application development. It provides a new level of application integration between Windows NT and OpenVMS by increasing application portability, making software maintenance easier and less expensive, and providing for rapid prototyping of new applications.

The Galaxy software architecture on OpenVMS is an evolutionary step of the OpenVMS operating system that delivers greater scalability, and highly available computing in a single computer. It enables multiple instances of OpenVMS to execute on a single computer.

"As Internet application and Windows NT-based applications grow, Compaq intends to supply back-end data servers that will process data from dozens of distributed servers, and thousands of end users. Importantly, as network demand for service peaks, IT managers will gain flexible system administration because of the support Galaxy provides for multiple computer partitions," says Jean S. Bozman, software analyst, International Data Corp. (Mountain View, Calif.).

As of Affinity Wave 6, Galaxy is only capable of partitioning multiple instances of OpenVMS, but Compaq’s Marcello says that will change. "Future versions of Galaxy will be enhanced to run NT and Unix in the same box," he says. – Thomas Sullivan, Staff Reporter/Reviews Editor

About the Author

Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.

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