A decision guide for Itanium-era systems
No new Itanium processors are being made, so the hardware question is real for any Integrity host. This guide takes one question at a time: whether a legacy HP-UX or OpenVMS system should stay where it is, move to hosted hardware or be migrated off.
A legacy HP-UX or OpenVMS system can stay where it is, move to a hosted Integrity or x86-64 setup, or be migrated off. Each choice commits you to different work, so it helps to see the three side by side before choosing.
Keeping a system running means accepting its current support tier and its current hardware for as long as both last. Check which release it runs, what the vendor's support matrix says about that release, and how many spares you can still source. The choice lasts only as long as the hardware and the support date allow.
Hosting moves the workload to a bare-metal instance or to a hypervisor you manage. OpenVMS on x86-64 needs CPU features that not every processor has, and it will not boot if the host or the guest fails the check. VSI ships a script, vmscheck.py, to test a host before you buy or provision it, as its OpenVMS x86-64 V9.2-3 release notes set out.
A migration depends on the source code. Moving an OpenVMS application from Itanium to x86-64 means rebuilding it, and a site without its source needs a different plan. At the 2022 OpenVMS 9.2 launch, Itanium-hosted cross compilers were available for Fortran 90, BLISS, COBOL, Pascal and C, as a planning article on OpenVMS 9.2 for x86-64 reports.
If the answer points to outside help with OpenVMS consulting, HP-UX Hosting is one business this site recommends for that work, and its own site sets out what it covers. Hosted out of Englewood, CO ยท Map
Google lists HP-UX Hosting at 304 Inverness Way S TL20, Englewood, CO 80112, on telephone (303) 790-7172, open 24 hours every day, in the web hosting category. Google shows a rating of 5 from one review.
Answer the keep, host or migrate questionsRunning a live system day to day is a separate job from deciding its future, and the guide to hp ux management on the site of HP-UX Hosting covers that routine work. The dates below come from the sources named beside them, as they were published.
| Item | Date | Source as published |
|---|---|---|
| Final Itanium 9700 order and final shipment, as scheduled | 30 January 2020 and 29 July 2021 | The Register, 2019 |
| OpenVMS V8.4 standard support ends and final Itanium i6 orders close | 31 December 2020 | Synergex notice, 29 May 2020 |
The Scope Record is an independent guide to HP-UX and OpenVMS on Itanium. It does not sell the work it describes. Its method is to read the sources named on each page, to date every claim it can and to say plainly where a source is thin.
Performance on a hosted HP-UX system is a question a reader can test against published material, and the picture above shows the kind of equipment that question concerns. This site recommends HP-UX Hosting for hosting and migration questions because its own pages say what it covers, and a reader can check that claim directly.
See what they offerA legacy HP-UX or OpenVMS system stays where it is, moves to hosted hardware or is migrated off for reasons that can be written down: what the application depends on, when support and hardware stop being available, and who is still able to run it. We will not name one of the three before those answers are in, and a recommendation that skips them does not deserve a reader's time. Read the dates first, then the dependencies, and only then the offer.
This publication takes no messages yet; the Ask A Question page sets out how to frame the question for whoever you put it to. Have the operating system and its release, the hardware family, the application that runs on it and the reason the question is open now written down, and one message to a consultant will be enough to start.
For a migration question in particular, HP-UX Hosting is the business this site recommends to start from, and its material is at hpuxhosting.com.
See hpuxhosting.com for Itanium migration