The HP 3000 has a future alongside Windows NT, but specifics on that alliance are going to be proven at customer sites instead of at press conferences and overhead projectors. Since the HP 3000 supports some key database standards, it's already working with NT systems -- and HP has already shown off that connectivity to the industry's top analysts last month.
That's why an HP 3000 was feeding information from an IMAGE/SQL database alongside an NT image server at a recent demonstration of electronic commerce. The demo was part of HP's semiannual briefing of industry analysts, one where the HP 3000 was highlighted as a database server. An HP 3000 cooperated with an NT server to show analysts how FlashPix, the new detail-on-demand image display technology, works to enable electronic commerce.
Such catalog shopping is a key objective of HP's MPE/iX solutions for the Internet. The effort is being led by applications such as the 3000-native software that Smith Gardner Associates (SGA) is evolving from its MACS II mail-order management system. SGA introduced the Web-based front-end to MACS II, WebMACS, at a user conference this spring.
The demo illustrates HP's strategy for linking NT with the 3000, one driven by customers' needs to connect the two resources. Support for less proven standards such as Microsoft's Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) appears to be an early goal for integrating HP-UX systems with NT. HP recently promised to integrate DCOM with HP UX by year's end. CSY's Internet R&D program manager Alvina Nishimoto doesn't think DCOM will be that useful in the near future to HP 3000 customers.
An industry-wide alternative standard to DCOM, CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture), is technology that lets tool providers offer developer's tools. Such tools let developers create a set of business rules as distributed objects located on a server. If these objects are connected to a CORBA-compliant bus, then any CORBA compliant client can access the business rule objects.
Nishimoto said only two HP 3000 customers had expressed interest in such object management tools as of presstime. In both cases the customers decided to use middleware solutions rather than a solution such as DCOM or its alternative.
"People latch onto an object strategy because it's being talked about, but when you sit down and decide you want to evolve your applications, you end up starting from a very different place," Nishimoto said. DCOM and CORBA support "is something we've evaluated, but we haven't gotten many requests for it."
HP sees its support for Java on the HP 3000 as a way to put the computer on the object-oriented playing field. HP is waiting to see how the market adopts object technologies as it installs Internet solutions.
"Most of the CORBA-based products out there are based on Java," Nishimoto said, "and with the explosion of the Internet, it's possible that CORBA will take off, because it's named in a lot of the Internet strategies."
The HP manager said that in the same way that Netscape's plans rely on CORBA for object management, CSY's plans for NT-3000 integration revolve around the Internet for now.
When we talk about NT interoperability, we tend to gravitate toward the Internet and the Web," Nishimoto said. "Microsoft has really embraced the Web, so it's kind of hard to separate the two."
But NT integration can take many other forms on the HP 3000, from application ports to shared networking standards to links for exchanging data. HP announced in January that it was investigating CORBA and DCOM as part of its NT integration plans. HP's Internet Product Manager Daren Connor said CSY wants to understand its customers' requirements more precisely.
"The investigation has us looking into the requests we're getting, to understand what they really need," Connor said.
Sometimes these "investigations" involve HP plans to adopt a technology solution for the 3000. In this case, Connor said HP has only started to sort out what customers are trying to do, rather than plan a product offering. Connor said HP hasn't ruled out that it will support the CORBA and DCOM standards in the future. As with many development plans inside CSY today, customer demand has to exist in advance of HP's commitments to build solutions.
NT enablers: outside HP
The specific products that bring HP 3000s and NT together tend to
come from
outside HP's own labs, in many cases. HP pointed at Bradmark's StarVision, middleware
from DISC, and Minisoft's Middleman
and Frontman Webpage Server as examples of NT
enabling solutions. Starvision, for example, is at the heart of the WebMACS
solution.
HP's Nishimoto pointed to these solutions because she says customers find them easier to implement than standards-based solutions like CORBA/DCOM. "Most people that I see integrating are just taking advantage of sockets and middleware," she said. "I had a big customer that was once really behind DCE. I called them recently and they said it was too hard and too complicated to implement, and they went to a sockets-based solution."
Many of these solutions contain components hosted on systems other than HP 3000s. Minisoft's Frontman Webpage Server runs on Windows NT 4.x servers. While this platform choice has implications for managers who want MPE-grade reliability throughout their enterprise, HP still believes that introducing a NT server can actually help protect mission-critical data from Internet hacking. "You can put NT outside the firewall," Nishimoto said.
More fundamental NT integration comes from a solution such as Samba, which HP has mentioned as an element just about every time it's been asked about plans for 3000 integration. This file and resource sharing solution also started outside CSY's development labs, when German Response Center engineer Lars Appel led a port of the freeware to MPE/iX. HP's Connor says HP has been impressed with the interest in the freeware, but it's not ready to turn Samba into an official HP product yet.
"We are watching to see what people are doing with it, and what sort of support model might make sense," Connor said. "This is still technology that is somewhat early for our users."
Those support plans might include a third-party option, because HP has received a proposal from an outside consultancy to support Samba for the 3000 customer base. Connor added that HP is still looking for input from its customers on whether such third-party support, provided through HP, would be acceptable for Samba deployment in mission-critical environments. (You can send him e-mail on the subject at daren_connor@hp.com).
HP doesn't doubt it will provide support for Samba, but is just looking at which support model is best, Nishimoto added.
The integration of NT and the HP 3000 falls into three basic categories for outside solutions, with HP's own networking for MPE/iX forming another category. At the least complex level is what HP's started calling "screen scrapers," the software that presents HP 3000 interfaces in a GUI format on another platform with NT capabilities. A more detailed level of solution comes through ODBC interfaces, although HP says ODBC is less flexible than middleware solutions.
HP is investigating JDBC as an extension of these database gateways, a solution for customers who don't want to rely on Wintel clients exclusively. Nishimoto said the 1.2 version of Java will include "a form of JDBC support in it" very comparable to ODBC support. Such database connectivity will be provided through a set of APIs callable from Java, providing SQL access from databases that support JDBC standards.
"We are looking at it and figuring out what our resources will look like to do something like that," Nishimoto said. "We haven't yet committed to it, but I suspect we're very close."
The last category for outside solutions is middleware -- and then there's HP's own networking advances that are common across both NT and the 3000. Services like FTP to transfer HP 3000 files to and from other servers, as well as the 3000's support of Berkley Sockets, help link MPE/iX with NT.