Depending on
what you are doing you don't necessarily need an enormous
amount of physical memory on an Alpha to run VMS.
In part it depends on how you define "Enormous Amounts", based on my
experience the minimum to run OpenVMS on Alpha is 112MB, and on a VAX that
would be an "Enormous Amount". Of course my main system is currently
running with 640MB RAM and sitting at 42% used.
For an Alpha an enormous amount would be 1GB or more. An Alpha has a higher
memory footprint than a VAX due to the Alpha being a RISC processor. Memory
for an Alpha is relatively inexpensive, though, so that's not a problem.
But again, it all depends on what you are doing. If you aren't running
DECwindows, a database, or supporting a lot of interactive users an Alpha
with 128MB is fine. On the other hand, one of the clusters I manage has
two VAX 7730 systems with 2GB of memory each and the memory isn't going
to waste.
--
Eric Dittman
dittman(a)dittman.net