This book is intended for managers of Digital's VAX and Alpha
AXP computer systems. VAX is the brand name of a computer system
made by Digital Equipment Corporation of Maynard, Massachusetts.
The various models of the VAX computer range in capacity from
a desktop workstation to a company-wide mainframe. Alpha AXP is
the brand name of another computer system made by Digital which
uses the same operating system as the VAX. A System Manager is
the person who is in charge of or responsible for such a computer
system - its maintenance, operation and management. Put bluntly,
the System Manager is the person who gets in trouble when the
computer goes down or isn't working as well
as it should.
Naturally, for this book to be of any use to you at all, you have
to have a VAX or Alpha AXP computer system or at least be planning
to have one in the future. That VAX or Alpha AXP has to have disks,
since the problems we will discuss occur only on disks. The computer
has to be turned on, not shut down for use as a doorstop somewhere,
and it has to be at least occasionally used. If you don't use
it, you won't get the fragmentation disease
and you wouldn't care if you did.
This computer of yours has to be running the VMS (or OpenVMS)
operating system. Other computers and other operating systems
suffer from fragmentation too, but this book is specifically written
with the OpenVMS system in mind. The fragmentation problem is
so important, and so inherent in the OpenVMS system, it would
be a mistake to try and generalize this discussion into something
applicable to any computer or operating system.
VAX and Alpha AXP System Managers, this book is for you!
System Managers run into a lot of problems keeping their users happy with the performance of the computer system. One problem that haunts virtually every System Manager, and literally plagues those with more than a few disk drives to care for, is fragmentation. Fragmentation, more fully defined in a later chapter, is a sort of disease that affects computer systems, causing them to slow down and perform badly, somewhat like an arthritic old man who these days just can't get around quite as well as he used to. The problem is so widespread and so damaging and, surprisingly, so poorly understood, that an entire book on the subject is warranted.
So, who should read this book?
Any VAX or Alpha AXP System Manager who is interested in fragmentation.