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Comment by omnibrain | Hacker News Reader

I've never used it but I read a lot of accounts of superb clustering capabilities. You can have clusters spanning several OS releases on different hardware platforms.

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Clustering on VMS is mostly about marketing and integration, VMS cluster is essentially only about shared filesystem and same effect can be had by means of NFS and some kind of centralized management on Unix (even across different Unix OSes). It does not do any magic like process migration and intra-cluster shared memory.

From technical standpoint interesting feature is sane approach to asynchronous IO and IPC (think libevent in kernel).

There is nothing "only" about a clustered shared filesystem.

There may be a hundred of them but none works off the shelf for all applications. There are a lot of details in there.

You could probably make the point that early Google was "only" a clustered filesystem plus some apps running on top on it.

I can’t find the original source but I remember reading an article about a VMS cluster that was moved piecemeal between two towns in Belgium without any downtime. Individual machines went down during the move obviously, but the cluster as a whole was able to stay up.

I remember this - I thought it was on el reg, but worse, it was theinq :)

https://web.archive.org/web/20031219162954/http://www.theinq...

Wow, so it was. Takes me back :) Thanks for digging it up! Here’s the source story: http://www.openvms.org/stories.php?story=03/11/28/7758863

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