ProQuest Alison

ProQuest had always been an advanced user of technology and had adopted VMS as its central operating system from the early days. Over the years the application library had been built up and enhanced to such an extent that the fit to business was perfect. VMS proved to be an excellent base for many applications and as the years progressed these systems supported more and more aspects of the organisation.

How do you replace 20 years worth of perfectly tailored applications built on rich operating systems with a modern technology that often does little better than cater for the lowest common denominator. Call me a dinosaur if you wish but we all know compromise is inevitable, sometimes on a massive scale.

ProQuest like many companies, took the line it would replace those that could be done without to much loss of detail whilst keeping the critical in-house applications intact for future use. Good move but then what about the hardware?

ProQuest was also an early adopter of migrated systems, purchasing the UK's first cluster, and for a while, by running 5 top-end VAX replacements, it was also the largest user, both in terms of running systems and user community.

One of the interesting things about this site is that despite being heavy users for many years now it's only had one real problem in the early days where we had to slow down the network to 100M half duplex, a problem long since solved.

It also has one more thing to say though and that revolves around the fact that the company has moved twice over the last 7 years. It will quite happily tell you that moving 5 Proliants is substantially easier than a large VAX cluster and all that went with that.

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