It's hard for organizations to justify annual maintenance costs of tens of thousands of us dollars or more if they only have a few OpenVMS applications that are "mission-critical."

Hewlett-Packard's retirement of its MPE and OpenVMS lines, for example, presents a serious challenge to customers who have depended on these minicomputer brands during the last decades.

A properly outfitted Linux server can emulate the hardware for a licensed copy of OpenVMS, at a far more modest cost than the one to keep a legacy host humming for just a few useful hours a year.