HP considers enhancements in 3000 future

OpenMPE meeting announces more than 20 experts willing to work on MPE’s future

Fresh engineering talent and a chance for more HP-designed MPE/iX enhancements emerged from the latest meeting of the OpenMPE advocacy organization. As the countdown to HP’s end of sales date ticks away, supporters of the system are counting up new resources that can extend the life of the 30-year-old business server.

Customers at the Interex e3000 Solutions Symposiums were identifying themselves more often as homesteaders than as migration-bound, running up the count of sites which do not plan to move away from the system before HP ends its support on Dec. 31, 2006. As they did in the Valley Forge, Pa. meeting of the symposium in March, these homesteading supporters outdrew attendees in competing sessions at the three-and-a-half day conference in San Jose last month.

Customers cited their budgets, or their lack of concern about immediate deterioration of the HP 3000 ecosystem, as they explained why they will remain on the platform at least several more years. Even HP’s staff still dedicated to the HP 3000 can see a significant share of the customers making no move away, but instead waiting for a chance to become customers of a 3000 hardware emulator.

“I’ve talked to the customers, and they’re staying,” said HP engineer Mike Paivinen, who’s been in charge of marshalling HP resources for the homesteading sites. “A lot of those customers expressed an interest in an emulator. There are plenty of people at companies out there who have already made the decision to stay, with whatever the investment is that it takes. It’s not just small companies — it’s midsize companies, and divisions of large companies.”

As the discussion at the OpenMPE meeting progressed, the organization announced that it has located more than 20 experts in MPE design who are willing to participate in continued enhancement of the operating environment. This engineering talent is outside of HP, according to OpenMPE board member Ken Sletten. All that remains is to fund the engineering work, a task that HP’s Paivinen seemed certain could proceed given the customers’ dedication to staying on the platform.

“It’s hard for me to imagine we can’t find 200 customers out there who can come up with $1,000 as a down payment on the first copy of the emulator,” he said.

Discussion of what’s needed besides funding to make an emulator succeed for the 3000 customers led to another revelation for OpenMPE attendees in San Jose. HP said that further enhancements to MPE/iX remain a prospect throughout the HP support lifespan for the operating environment. Some customers at the meeting said they assumed HP would stop work on MPE/iX when the company stopped selling this system this fall.

HP promised at the symposium that it will release, on average, two PowerPatches to MPE/iX per year through the year 2006. HP’s business manager for the 3000 Dave Wilde said those PowerPatches may well contain enhancements for the system, not simply bug fixes.

“We will understand where the customer needs are, and meet them,” Wilde said. “That’s not to say absolutely that there will be enhancements in those PowerPatches, or that there will not be. There are ways to get new functionality through a patch release, not just a mainline release. And we’ve never said there won’t be another mainline. We’ve only said the likelihood of another mainline is going down over time.”

Help from the outside

HP’s Paivinen confirmed that the top priority for OpenMPE is the creation of a virtual lab, a group of experts in MPE/iX who will work together to aid the operating environment’s evolution. OpenMPE passed along word that more than 20 such experts have been located and will make themselves available for the work, presumably when funding starts to flow through the virtual lab model.

“Speaking for [OpenMPE board chairman] Jon Backus, what that will look like is a count, if not a list, of the people who have already said they will be interested.”

Sletten said OpenMPE board member Mark Klein, who has worked for HP’s MPE lab on contract and managed the R&D labs for software provider ORBiT, has been in charge of locating the MPE/iX talent for OpenMPE. “The number of people is more than 20 who have expressed interest in this work,” Sletten said.

Among the tasks for this virtual lab would be creation of pseudo-drivers, or pass-through drivers, to make any 3000 emulator capable of using modern peripherals — those released after HP stops selling new 3000 systems later this year. This lab would work with source code for MPE/iX when HP agrees to release the core MPE programs to the OpenMPE virtual development group.

More work from HP

As attendees at the meeting began to examine how they could help the platform continue to evolve, discussion returned to how much HP was willing to help. A new round of enhancement requests is still up for HP’s review. The top three requests were the removal of software throttling on the A-Class and low-end N-Class servers; putting all documentation for the 3000, including CE manuals, on the Web outside HP’s firewalls, and producing a “parking patch” for the 6.5, 7.0 and 7.5 releases of MPE/iX.

John Burke, the SIG-MPE chair and a member of MPE Forum, said at the meeting that HP still needs to give its response to the latest round of enhancement requests that customers voted on this spring. Sletten noted that the new concept of pseudo-drivers should be promoted to the list of items that customers requested during February’s balloting.

While some in the 3000 community surmised that ballot would be the last Software Improvement Ballot for MPE/iX, HP’s 3000 staff and officials at the meeting disagreed. “Software development doesn’t end on Oct. 31 of this year,” Paivinen said. “We’ll be looking at what the needs of customers are as they try to run their businesses through 2006. If the investments are reasonable in cost and scale, we’ll evaluate them.”

Software suppliers in the room asked HP to provide responses to the requests in time for the HP partner conference scheduled for early June, to help those suppliers plan their continued MPE/iX development. HP’s Paivinen said he hoped the SIB ballots would continue through the next three years to give HP more chance to evaluate potential enhancements.