The savvy faithful attending the SIG3000 meeting at HP’s headquarters this month were among the first to hear a proposal that could free up massive storage on 3000 community’s disks, using the first disk partitioning for MPE/iX. Allegro Consultants’ Stan Sieler, vice-chair of the SIG-MPE special interest group now being chaired by John Burke, told SIG-MPE members about a proposal he’s filed with the HP labs team. It would eliminate a growing amount of wasted disk space on customers’ systems, all of which are now forced to limit the size of the 3000’s boot device to 4Gb. In the most extreme cases, a customer can have a 72-Gb drive serving as LDEV1 today, but have to ignore 68 Gb on the drive because of the longstanding MPE/iX limit of 4 Gb. Partitions would be particularly valuable on the new A-Series, which have room for only two internal disk drives.

HP reported at the SIG meeting that it’s got its own plan to get around the LDEV1 size limit, but it doesn’t have an estimated date for when all those millions of megabytes would be freed up. Sieler’s proposal brings other benefits, since it would let large drives be split into many virtual spindles for better system reliability, and provide the ability to go beyond the 72-Gb size limit for storage devices on MPE/iX.

“This would allow a single physical disk drive to be configured/mounted as one or more logical disk drives,” the proposal read. “For example, a 100-Gb disk drive might have a 4-Gb partition, followed by a 72-Gb partition, followed by a 24-Gb partition, and be configured as LDEVs 1, 2, and 19.” Sieler also said partitioning would help those MPE/iX users who have already run into problems because “they have a very large number of files, and have exhausted the not-very-expandable Label Table on the disks of a volume set.” HP was complimentary of the proposal, submitted for SIG approval of before entering the balloting process that could deliver it to customers’ 3000s.