HP’s Commercial Systems Division (CSY) announced on Feb. 1 that it will offer the Apache Web Server as a supported product for MPE/iX beginning in August, 1999. CSY will begin a beta-test program in May with a selected customer base to test the server running in the HP 3000 environment. The software has been running on HP 3000s for almost three years as unsupported freeware.

HP will be offering Apache/iX immediately from the CSY Jazz Web site, in an unsupported version. The 1.3.3 version will be available for download. HP will evaluate Apache 1.3.4 as part of its August supported release. Apache-SSL support is still being evaluated, as HP points to the majority of its Web-using 3000 sites that run secure servers on other platforms with links to 3000 data.

Apache is the market leader in numbers of servers installed, holding a 54 percent market share in the latest survey from NetCraft according to figures from HP’s Internet managers. The server is installed at many sites, but some observers note that many of the installations aren’t mission-critical and don’t require security.

Ozlem Ozturk, the Internet and Interoperability Product Manager for CSY, said that HP is still investigating how to provide SSL security capability for Apache/iX. Licensing issues surrounding SSL’s use on Apache are part of the investigation, she said.

The announcement signals the end of an 18-month project to bring Netscape’s FastTrack to the HP 3000. HP will be porting the LDAP directory services used by Netscape’s FastTrack product for a future offering on the HP 3000, Ozturk said. The manager said the Open Source Code model of development used by Apache developers — a model where programmers around the world write for the product in a shared, no royalties environment — was the most attractive part of the decision to shift away from Netscape’s product. Sun’s ownership of the Netscape server code was not an issue, she said.

HP will be taking a customer-driven approach to deciding the Web server security question, Ozturk said. HP 3000 managers will have to tell HP that running a secure Web server under MPE/iX is important, because many 3000 sites in the customer base use NT Web servers that exchange data with HP 3000 mission-critical servers. Smith-Gardner Associates’ WebOrder application follows this model for its popular 3000 mail order application. However, some other 3000 solution suppliers, such as the banking application offered by CASE, need a secure server.