Budgets for spending and time still tax migrating firms

The news might not surprise the companies who’ve already started their transitions away from HP 3000s, but a pair of reports from 3000 sites making migrations show that making a switch can demand serious expenditures of time and capital. In Australia at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), three HP 3000s continue to chug along while waiting for a $40 million PeopleSoft project to be completed.

The school continues to use the 3000s to manage student records because the Academic Management System, labeled a “farce” and “failed” in the Australian Web news site Crikey.com, still needs another $24 million to be ready by 2005. The AMS system went live at RMIT in 2001, but it’s still not working, so the HP 3000s continue to meet the customer’s needs while millions more get poured into the Unix-based AMS. RMIT plans to keep its HP 3000s running for another year, just in case. The latest effort plans to put AMS on Sun’s hardware, in an attempt to improve performance.

Meanwhile, at the Germantown, Md. facility of Hughes Network Systems, one of the biggest installations for MANMAN is making its transition to Oracle, but learning that its shift away from the 3000 and IMAGE/SQL is only the beginning. Chuck Ciesinski at the IT department in Germantown reports that his Oracle database administrators were advised by Oracle to do an export, and then re-import, of the corporation’s Oracle databases to make a move from PA-RISC HP-UX servers to the Itanium-based HP-UX 11i version 2.Ciesinski said his DBA “has equated this process to a DBUNLOAD/DBLOAD on the HP 3000, to give me a feel for the timings.” Such unloads and loads were among the most time-intensive processes in 3000 management, a process so onerous that one notable MPE software provider, Adager, founded itself on a product that eliminated the reloading.