Porting and Migrating Applications

Migration to OpenVMS Itanium/Integrity platforms can be somewhat difficult and/or relatively easy. The primary issue is where you are starting from:

• Some compilers on the VAX did not enforce ANSI compliant programming. The Alpha and Integrity compilers are generally more strict in their enforcement; therefore there may be more source coding issues that need to be addressed. This is affected most by the C and COBOL languages.
• Data alignment issues always affect the performance of applications. This is greater on Alpha, and significantly greater on Integrity than it was on VAX.
• The default floating point data formats is different between Alpha and Integrity. This can have anywhere from no impact to significant impact to the porting.
• HP does provide a lab for customers to use to accomplish their migration projects. Please note that PARSEC Group uses its own Integrity lab when performing migration projects for customers.

Migration projects need to be assessed to determine just how much source code migration, floating point and data alignment issues need to be addressed. PARSEC Group provides services to assess the issues that need to be addressed and also offers services to perform the migration. Because HP has done such a great job in implementing the OpenVMS Integrity environment some migrations can be completed in one week or less, while others may take longer to complete as you move forward and become more standards compliant.

This is where our depth of real-world experience really comes into play on your behalf; we apply our understanding of the operating system internals to create code with integrity and reliability.

Some of the projects PARSEC Group has done include the following environment migrations:

• VAX OpenVMS to Microsoft Windows
• VAX OpenVMS to Alpha OpenVMS and Tru64 UNIX
• VAX OpenVMS to Integrity OpenVMS