HP might have announced its exit plan for leaving the 3000 community, but a recent set of support extensions shows that its customers want to stay where they’re at as long as they can. A dozen models of HP 3000s got their end of support date extended through December, 2006, ranging from the aging Series 991 to the relatively newer Series 969s. For the record, the newly-extended support life went out to the Series 968 and 978 LX and RX models, the 988LX, the 939KS, Series 959/x00 and 969/x00 (non "fat-cache") systems, as well as the Emerald-Class enterprise servers Series 991, 995, 996/80 and 996/x00. HP has asserted that it wouldn’t be able to support these systems any longer than spare parts held out; those Series 991s were scheduled to slip off HP support by August of 2003. Now all the models will remain eligible for HP support contracts through the end of HP’s involvement with the 3000, currently set at the end of 2006. HP’s official reason for extending the support of these hardware models is said to be “customers’ requests,” as well as “launching a wide, aggressive effort to extend the limited supply of replacement parts for the HP e3000 products. HP invested to discover new ways to strengthen our limited material supply, including developing a new process to repair parts that would have been discarded.”

Most interesting of all was an admission that HP was “re-assessing worldwide parts inventories after getting more clarity from our customers regarding their migration plans.” This meant, according to HP’s 3000 Business Manager Dave Wilde, that customers have been upgrading their HP 3000s to the newer A-Class and N-Class systems since the HP announcement of last November, making their older hardware available for parts as a result of trade-ins. HP sees the customers’ reaction to the end of support as a mixed picture, but remains steadfast in its view that many roads lead away from the 3000.

“Not surprisingly, the feedback we've received from customers on their plans varies.” Wilde said. “Many customers who are in the process of planning or implementing a transition intend to first upgrade to the latest available hardware and software environment, allowing them to run their business on current technology while they plan and implement their transition. However, a significant number of customers prefer to focus on the transition, and not invest more time and money in major upgrades of their e3000 environment.” Following this last bit of thinking, HP believes there’s a part of the 3000 community that wants every month of extra support from HP it can get for the 3000s these companies already own and rely upon — because they apparently don’t plan to upgrade anything 3000-related that they don’t have to.

The extensions didn’t trickle out as far as the biggest group of HP 3000 servers, the Series 9x7s. Hardware support options for these systems slipped out of HP’s grasp at the end of April, and the HP extension of support for the other systems was the best chance to keep these customers in the HP revenue stream. Third-party options for the machines’ support are plentiful, as copious as the hardware itself available for spare parts. A list of support suppliers for such systems is available at the OpenMPE Web site, www.openmpe.org. Older-model HP 9000 servers can also supply 9x7 parts, too.