HP will this month bolster the prospects of its well-travelled OpenVMS operating system by releasing an evaluation version that runs on Intel's 64bit Itanium processor.

Having been available for over a quarter of a century in various guises, VMS remains crucial to many large IT infrastructures. It came under HP's aegis when the firm acquired Compaq in 2002, and was originally developed by Digital before Compaq bought the company in 1998.

HP, like Compaq before it, said it planned to make the operating system available on IA-64, the 64bit processor architecture underlying the Itanium, to provide continuity after HP's acquired Alpha processors are phased out this decade.

The evaluation software, OpenVMS Industry Standard I64, is available this month and is targeted at firms that want to get an early start on porting to HP's Integrity server line before commercial-grade software is available in the second half of this year.

HP said it plans to offer a phased migration. "You could have a cluster of Alpha and Itanium servers all running the same software," commented Iain Stephen, HP enterprise servers director.