In October of 2005 HP announced that Alpha processor based systems would no longer be sold after October of 2006. HP has made a commitment to customers to provide engineering support and parts for these systems until the year 2011.

TSC’s core application base depends on an operating system owned by HP called OpenVMS. HP has signed contractual agreements with the US government that guarantee OpenVMS will be sold and serviced to at least the year 2021. Considering the rate of change in the IT industry this commitment is considerable, no other vendor has made a commitment like it for other operating systems.

What is important for all TSC customers to recognize is that our dependency is on the OpenVMS operating system not on the Alpha processor.

HP has replaced the Alpha processor with a new processor from Intel called the I64 and has released a new line of servers called the Integrity. This exciting new platform runs several leading operating systems including HP OpenVMS.

At the 2004 Users Group TSC announced that it had ported its applications to an Integrity test server on loan from HP. In mid 2005 TSC acquired its own I64 server, ported the core code base and established a maintenance program on it. At the 2005 users group TSC announced that the I64 code base was fully ported and ready for customer deployment. Here we are at mid 2006 with one customer about to go-live on an I64 server and 2 more committed to migration.

It’s clear to TSC that the I64 is a wonderful platform that is worthy of its role as replacement for Alpha.

All TSC core applications are available now on OpenVMS/I64. No major changes to code were required. This migration took less time and had fewer issues than TSC’s migration from VAX to Alpha in the early 90’s.

Customers running OpenVMS/Alpha can expect many more years of faithful service from those systems and have full faith that OpenVMS/I64 will be ready and available when you are ready to upgrade.

If you have any questions please feel free to contact us.