The speeds on the newest chip don't represent the fastest capabilities of the PA-8000 designs, HP says. It will be awhile before you can see just how fast a PA-8000 will make your HP 3000s scream. That's because HP's first implementation for the new chip appears in a midrange system, even if at the top of the midrange. HP's only promising a 5.6 performance rating for the Series 979KS/100 as compared to the 4.8 rating for the previous top of the midrange, the Series 969KS/120. If you get your calculators out you see it's about 15 percent faster than its predecessor. HP says it plans to improve performance for the newest systems through enhancements to MPE/iX and the databases included in that $104,000 bundle. The list price for a 1-way system includes IMAGE/SQL, an integrated 2Gb disk, a 4-Gb DDS DAT drive, CD-ROM and a monochrome system console. (See our upcoming issues for more details on this story).
With Mohawk comes a tribe of new storage devices. HP's making good on its promises to provide relief for your backup bottleneck, releasing both a new DAT device as well its first HP-label Digital Linear Tape device. The new DDS-3 DAT drives have a capacity of 12 to 24 Mb per cartridge, depending on whether you use hardware compression or not. The best news might be the performance of the newest tape drives, which HP says is 3.6Gb per hour in the non-compressed mode. With disk farms now topping 20Gb in a surprising number of HP 3000 shops, getting something faster than DDS-2 was vital to being able to call a system mission critical and keep it backed up during the third shift. The cost for the DDS-3 units will be about $6,500, for a backup cost of $542 per gigabyte. That's a sharp drop down from the DDS-2 cost of $699/Gb, based on the $2,795 cost of those older DAT drives.
If all that won't satisfy your backup needs -- and it might not at the successful healthcare and direct mail customer sites which push the 3000 to its limits -- HP's got a DLT solution of its own now. Sure, it's just the Quantuum 4000 unit with some HP modifications, but then Quantuum owns the DLT technology, so nobody's going to be offering anything much different than their designs for awhile. The HP device, priced at just under $8,000, delivers up to 40Gb of capacity per cartridge at speeds the HP 3000 has never seen before. Customers have already been using DLT devices with solutions like Orbit Software's Backup+, and they report backup times are dropping in a hurry using the new tape devices. One customer said he had a backup of his Series 995 disks that took 12 hours, counting disk-to-disk backups before and after processing which the tape device stored. Hooking DLT into the system cut the backup to 93 minutes. The savings is a little less dramatic with smaller amounts of data, but even a 3-hour Series 939 backup got cut to 23 minutes.
HP has also rolled out new RAID disk units (Model 10 and Model 20, covered in our current issue) at the same time it's shipping the new Series 979s. Everything depends on the PowerPatch 1 for MPE/iX 5.5, which includes the drivers you'll need to make all this storage sit up and fetch. HP estimates that it will ship PowerPatch 1 around November 23, and the DLT and DDS-3 units are supposed to come available a week later. (See our upcoming issues for more details on this story).
HP's making Java jump on 3000s at Internet World. It all began with customers looking for HP 3000s at Internet trade shows, places more major than HP World. Now that the 3000 has got a Java solution, HP's shipping the system off to the big Internet World show next month to show off the reliable server to those who might not know it so well. HP's been suggesting all through the Mohawk introduction that the systems are well-suited as Internet servers. Now at Internet World the Commercial Systems Division will show off Java applets being served from HP 3000s, interfacing with TurboIMAGE and IMAGE/SQL databases. HP's Rosie Chiovari, the product manager for the 3000-as-an-Internet device, called to say that Smith Gardner's MACS II mail order application would be part of the Internet World splash, enabled to take advantage of the Internet. For HP's part, Mike Yawn is working on demonstrating a graphical applet running on an HP 3000, and getting a Java application to run on the HP 3000 and access TurboIMAGE.
The Internet World appearance is important for several reasons, even if you don't use your 3000 as an Internet platform today. First, it's a way to push the HP 3000 into a market where it's not already well-known. A mighty share of HP's marketing is aimed at its installed base, but the HP 3000 has only begun to scratch the surface of the Internet marketplace. Second, it's a plain demonstration that the HP 3000 is staying current with its Unix brethren in the HP server line. HP made a big splash about Java in the HP-UX operating system as part of the big Oracle show held at the start of November, an introduction that bumped the 3000's Series 979 rollout by a week. Java isn't yet bundled with MPE/iX, but HP has started opening links to documentation and source code for the Java TurboIMAGE class library at CSY's Jazz Web site. The Web is the same avenue of distribution HP is using for the HP-UX Java Virtual Machine. Additional links to 3000 Java-related topics will be added, including links to download the MPE/iX Virtual Machine software. Meanwhile, Yawn is providing alpha versions of the Machine via e-mail.
But the most important reason that a Java-on-the-3000 Internet World booth matters to the MPE community is what it tells other Internet developers about the HP 3000. In a nutshell, it says that the 3000 and the customers who use it are players ready for whatever advances Java may bring. PC Week and other national publications are saying that Java development is taking off so fast it's loosening Microsoft's grip on the desktop client community. That means that where 32-bit solutions are slow in coming for the HP 3000 (like ODBC drivers friendly to Windows 95 and so forth), Java can step in and take its place. HP's putting its own trial version of the Open Market Web Server software onto that Web Starter kit we wrote about last month, to help the installed base get a taste of using the 3000 as a server. Microsoft and ODBC may rule the world as we know it today, but it will be hard to keep the lid on the pot of Java ideas bubbling up through the application community. For the moment, it appears that Java tools are hotter than any ODBC solutions.
Javelin is on target for using the Web as a VPlus substitute. A short note from Rich Corn, who's developing the Javelin browser middleware for Minisoft, tells us the development is right on target. Javelin will enable you to use commonplace browsers as front-ends for your HP 3000 applications that use VPlus, and it will work with just about any client that can comply with the Navigator/Internet Explorer requirements. During October Corn said he demonstrated the product running over the Internet, with the HP 3000 part of the software installed on a machine in Snohomish, Washington. "Then I ran a VPlus application written in COBOL, executing on the HP 3000 in Snohomish, from my Netscape browser on my laptop from my Olympia office over my Netcom Internet connection," he said. "It seems to be working well and is reasonably fast given the Internet connection. I am hoping that we will be able to go to beta fairly soon." Look for a demo of Javelin accessible from MiniSoft's home page before too much longer.
MPE/iX 5.5 is getting few bug reports, but some are already on file. HP isn't rushing out a fix-laden PowerPatch release for MPE/iX 5.5, but the next revision of the operating system (PowerPatch 2) will have to address some printing and DTC problems that have cropped up. Customers report there's a blank page eject problem with 5.5 when printing to a networked printer, when the output was created in pre-spaced mode from COBOL or FORTRAN. It seems that serial printers are throwing a blank page under 5.5 in some circumstances, too. Check on Service Request 4701-328658 to find out if it can affect you; some users say anybody who's printing from COBOL to networked printers is at risk. At first the Response Center told customers no patch would be issued but a fix would be in MPE/iX 6.0, and that there was no workaround. Now HP has opened a patch, MPEJXC, to correct the networked printer defect. HP's also hearing about a DTC problem under the new release, according to NewsWire subscriber Duane Percox. "We have experienced terminal hangs running VPlus applications over DTCs when using MPE/iX 5.5," Percox said. The problem crops up when you have some switching between character and VPlus modes. "Our symptom was the inability of VPlus to get a satisfactory terminal status read in vopenterm." HP has a memory patch available (meaning you must apply it after each reboot) and is working on a permanent patch.
Tune into Robelle Radio on the Web. To get the full impact of what you can learn about the HP 3000 over the Internet, steer your browsers to Robelle's Web site and listen to a few HP 3000 technical talks, complete with slides that display automatically in sync with the speaker. It's one of the coolest Web tricks we've seen and 3000-specific, too.