That's something people keep forgetting that should be in any "Required Features for Good, Clustering Software" document. That they could move the software from VAX to Alpha to Itanium within same cluster was pretty amazing. Also a requirement for high-availability if a processor goes EOL. The other strategy is to bet on the market leader. Something they missed. ;)
Yeah, they (the new owner) is finally porting OpenVMS to x64. Their roadmap shows that this is going to be a long road, though. I can't remember their name...the company that bought VMS from HP. HP is licensing it from them for their own products.
They didn't buy it. HP is too greedy about the lucrative revenue & maybe patents they get off VMS that made me wonder why they killed it in the first place. Instead, it appears (not certain) that VMS Software Inc gets some OEM-like license that puts them in control of it while HP still owns it, can license it themselves (probably existing customers), and likely gets a portion of VMS Software Inc's licensing revenue. So, they've pushed off almost all responsibility for it onto another company without actually selling it or losing all the revenue.
Still a good development for VMS customers. Both legacy and people who will suffer through archaic stuff to reap benefits of bulletproof clusters. I'd be happy to. :) Only problem is it's basically got no security attention over the years with plenty of zero days or configuration issues lurking in there. If I deployed in a company, I plan to put network guards in front of it to absorb attacks while converting the traffic into something easy to process. Ideally, a PCI-based guard that forces it to only talk to the application's memory instead of rest of system. Plus safe-coded apps (Rust, Ada) and API wrappers to try to spot BS. That VMS supports cross-language development will probably help.
EDIT: The weird thing is they finished a port to Alpha ISA before they got to x86 ISA for migrations. I thought Alpha's already migrated to Itanium. Didn't see that coming lol.
