Teracloud survey

[martin]

Hi All,

I've just received an email from Nikita Grigorev of Teracloud with vmssoftware.com email (odd) asking me to fill in a questionnaire about OpenVMS. Apparently the questionnaire (hosted by d2h1r304.na1.hubspotlinks.com) asks about "businesses like yours". The first and most obvious question is: is this spam? Three different companies in as many paragraphs is a red flag. The second question follows, is this relevant to community licensees?

Thoughts please.

[cct]

I just deleted it. VMS backup has alwats worked for me, and with X86 it is so easy to backup a complete VM - just secure the XML definition and the disk containers

That seems good enough for a hobbyist

[dgordon]

It's not spam. VSI is one of the Teracloud companies. There are a number of people who work at the Teracloud level who have multiple email addresses. Nikita is a legit employee.

It seems like they sent out the survey to everyone with an expressed interest in x86 VMS. Shotgun is not always the best solution.

I haven't seen the survey but given the above comments, I know that BACKUP alone is not the solution for large customers and we're trying to collect some data to see what folks really want.

[martin]

@dgordon, thanks for the clarification, red flag duly hauled down. From your last paragraph I'd guess that a retired old man running a couple of VMs at home will not be able to contribute to the data you need.

[dgordon]

After I wrote the reply, I noticed that I had the same mail from Nikita in my inbox. Looks like it went out to VMS Interest list.

[arne_v]

I got it as well.

But I wonder who should fill it out.

Big enterprise running 10000 Linux VM's + 1000 Windows VM's + a few VMS systems and wanting to integrate backup of VMS into the same backup system as the rest?

Small ISV or department running a few VMS systems and wanting to backup their important code and data?

Hobbyist that has a hobbyist VMS system and does not really care much about backup?

[imiller]

I have received that survey and checked Nikita is a real person as one has to be careful.

I've aske for clarification on who should fill it out as I work for large multinational company and coordinating a single response across the international teams is not going to work.

[toofpic]

red flag

Hi Martin and everyone! Doug explained that the survey letter was not spam yesterday, but I still wanted to leave some comments myself:
- My name is Nikita, I'm a Product Manager for VMS Software, and I'm also in charge of working with Partners (software vendors, service companies, etc.)
- This is a real survey, and I've sent it. We do want to know what is used for backing up OpenVMS systems, and how. The main reasons for this are:

• migration to x86: there are a lot of solutions available for Itanium systems. On x86, the landscape is not completely empty, and we know about the progress several software vendors are making to deliver x86 compatible agents. But still, some companies are "on the fence" about this: "we don't see a demand" - okay, let's see it together. I have 54 submissions now, and x86 is mentioned in half of them. I know some companies are fine with VM snapshots, but if it's anything big, they need a proper functional solution, one solution on multiple OSes, etc.

• Planning our own development: how many BACKUP users we have? Do we need to prioritize working on our own solutions? The one thing I regret is that I didn't ask about use of ABS specifically.

- "different domains everywhere look sketchy" - yes they are! "Teracloud" is a company some of us are technically employed at, and I was sending out the survey through HubSpot (CRM), because they have a really nice forms functionality there.
I found out that our vmssoftware domain here is not approved there for emails like that, so I had to send from @teracloud address to avoid half of the letters thrown right into spam by mail servers. It is a good habit to check addresses and other "strange" things though - phishing and ransomware attacks are no joke!
- "I am just a community/hobby user, should I fill in the request?" - sure, why not? We're mostly interested in corporate usage landscape as we want to secure a future for companies that run production OpenVMS environments, but it's important to have a big picture anyway, so we do want to hear you.
- "I am a VMS Software employee, why did I get this?" - that's Nikita's fault, he has to clean his contact list up. Sorry!

Hope that clears everything, but I can answer more questions if needed. And if you want to share your thoughts on OpenVMS backups outside of the survey - you're welcome to do that!

Added in 12 minutes 25 seconds:

I've aske for clarification on who should fill it out as I work for large multinational company and coordinating a single response across the international teams is not going to work.

That is complicated, as the answers are saved as company properties (otherwise it would be complicated to analyze them), so if multiple people from the same company would answer, most answers would be overwritten by the last person answering.
Personal emails partially solve the problem, but:
- they're personal
- it'll take time and/or a letter to that person to get to know who are they representing. I'll have to write to them personally and ask if they need our assistance. Leaving your company name somewhere in the answers would help

But if a person is not saved as a company's contact, we're fine, and answers will be saved separately. It's not only about having the same domain, otherwise we would just have one collective lump of answers from @gmail users

[mberryman]

Hope that clears everything, but I can answer more questions if needed. And if you want to share your thoughts on OpenVMS backups outside of the survey - you're welcome to do that!

I did not get the survey but am happy to respond here. All of my systems back up to a SAN-based tape library. This currently presents me with a few problems related to VMS:

• OpenVMS x86 does not yet have any support for fibre channel tapes so backups must be performed from either an Alpha or an Integrity system. The speed of these relates to the second point.

• Tape drives have gotten somewhat faster since backup was written. As things stand now, backup maxes out the CPU before reaching the speed capacity of the tape drive, and this is with slower LTO drives (e.g. LTO4) much less the faster ones available. It makes me wonder if a multi-threaded version of backup would fare any better.

• Finally, is the 64K block size a limit of the tape driver or of backup? Modern backup software seems to use somewhat larger block sizes in order to achieve write speed.