Number 48 (Update of Volume 5, Issue 5)

Welcome to our 48th monthly edition of Online Extra — the e-mail update of our articles in recent issues of the 3000 NewsWire, plus items that have surfaced since we mailed our previous First Class issue (February, 2000). We e-mail our subscribers this file between the First Class issues they receive by mail, updating stories and adding articles that have developed between issues.

Ron Seybold
Editor in Chief

HP corrects performance ratings; benchmarks still in limbo

After we ran the first article on the newest high-end systems in our February issue, HP learned about a mistake in its latest performance figures for the systems. Figures released about the e3000 performance ratings got revised by HP, when customer Jeff Woods discovered that the reported number for a 6-processor Series 997 looked like it went down from a 4-processor system. The corrected numbers for the Series 997 line, as represented in HP 3000 Performance Units where 1 is a Series 918:

997/200 -- 13.2
997/400 -- 23.7
997/600 -- 32.2
997/800 -- 39.0
997/1000 -- 48.4
997/1200 -- 52.3

Kevin Cooper of the e3000 division's performance labs said that the boosts in the newest models of the line, the /1000 and /1200 10-way and 12-way 997s, are "due to new software features that are only enabled on 10-way and 12-way systems running MPE/iX 6.5."

When customers were examining the new performance marks, one noted that having a benchmark available to compare HP e3000s with other systems would be useful in getting management buy-in for 3000 upgrades. Some customers have hoped for a TPC-C benchmark on the HP e3000, something that the division has been loath to invest its resources in for several years now. One solution would be to get a group of customers and consultants working on the project, with help from HP through the new Shared Source program. Greg Stigers, a consultant at IT services company CGI, said that "I am hoping that a Shared Source approach could get the ball rolling, and generate enough interest to keep it rolling, while limiting the cost to any one person, group, or company."

Views of e3000 division (CSY) managers towards a TPC project have been that benchmarks would come at the expense of other technical projects within CSY. A typical viewpoint is the one that former lab section manager Jim Sartain told us about in 1998, in our Q&A interview. Sartain said, "Giving them a TPC [benchmark] number isn’t really going to be that persuasive. In fact, often those numbers don’t reflect the real world. There’s a big investment to do TPC benchmarking in hardware and people resources, which has marginal customer benefit." (Interestingly enough, Sartain is now working in R&D at the HP Open Skies operation, which is selling an application to customers who've never used an HP 3000. Open Skies isn't selling systems or software, though — just transactions in the apps on tap model.)

A little later on, HP's Solution Provider Program liasion Narinder Sandhu said that benchmarking the HP e3000 would be most likely to happen to leverage a big deal in an application sale, and HP could be counted on to help in that circumstance. But customers still working on defending the platform to their management say a TPC-C mark would help keep the 3000 from getting turned off.

Stigers of CGI and Gavin Scott of Allegro Consultants have both shown interest in the project. Scott said his company would be "happy to give [CSY] a proposal for a preliminary investigation into architecting an "MPE" implementation of TPC-C, including rough performance projections, etc., as a first step to determine more clearly whether it's something that's both worth doing and practical from a cost point of view."

Scott explained that "The way to do TPC-C on a 3000 is to write a '3000 application' that implements TPC-C using native TurboIMAGE calls and all the other good MPE programming features. It would certainly not be a small amount of work, but given a reasonable number of clever programmers, I think you could get some very impressive numbers out of MPE/iX."

Suggestions to get TPC benchmarks for the e3000 tend to come from the installed base customers who are using the system for home-grown applications, rather than the packaged, off-the-shelf apps such as Amisys and Smith-Gardner's WebOrder. The home-grown customers make up a much larger part of the e3000 installed base sales, but the packaged customers are in the majority of new HP 3000 sites. We can't think of a better project to show how Shared Source can help the entire e3000 customer base. While watching HP try to drum up help for its Java class library Shared Source project, it looks like Shared Source projects might need an advocate, someone to recruit volunteers. Since the e3000's advantages include transaction performance second to none, it's hard to see why a marketing effort for the system wouldn't benefit from this kind of advocacy.

3kworld does facelift on site, links live to 3000-L listserver

New navigational aids and better links to external content are the early plums in a revision of the 3kworld.com Web site this week. The new design went live on Friday, introducing the concept of "IntraCommunity Portals (ICPs) -- think GeoCities.com for the 3000 community." The reorganization is expected to highlight participation by e3000 customers who focus on vertical packages like eXegySys manufactuing or Mitchell-Humphrey financial software, by helping those customers see the array of specific chat rooms, message boards and online surveys connected to those vendors' ICPs.

The Web site is also increasing its content for general purpose HP 3000 managers, including a live link to the 3000-L mailing list traffic beginning on Monday the 20th. Content manager Brian Trembath said 3kworld.com visitors will be able to read all messages from the mailing list through the Web site, and post replies that can be read by mailing list devotees as well as the Internet newsgroup mirror of the mailing list. In short, the plan looks to extend the community exchange of the mailing list to a new set of e3000 sites, those that don't use the newsgroup or mailing list interface today.

3kworld.com is also providing original content through the auspices of its parent, e3000 North American distributor Client Systems. On March 23rd Chris Gauthier, Client Systems Technical Support Engineer, offered a tutorial on DLT 8000 in MPE/iX.

Administration guidebook for HP e3000 gets underway

Jon Diercks, who's contributed articles on the 3000 for the NewsWire in the past, dropped us a note to report he's working on a new technical book for MPE/iX administrators. "I wanted to let you know that I have been contracted by Prentice- Hall/HP Professional Books to write the MPE/iX System Administrator's Handbook, scheduled for October release. I am very excited about this project and I'm making good progress. With luck, we may even have a few advance copies to sell at HPWorld in September." We hope to publish some excerpts from the book closer to the publication date.

HP Jazz Web site gets another tutorial

The Jazz Web site operated by the e3000 division has a wealth of information to help manage HP 3000s, created by HP engineers and managers. The site recently gained a new tutorial from the HP 3000 Solutions Symposium. Alvina Nishimoto's talk on middle options and differences for e3000s is online in an HTML format that should run well in most browsers. Steer to http://jazz.external.hp.com/papers/SolSymposium_00/middleware /index.htm to step through the slides from Nishimoto's talk. It's also online as a PowerPoint slide show.

e3000 fans speak out in InformationWeek

After HP's work to get its e3000 rebranding noticed by the general computer trade press, one article in InformationWeek used the phrase "decades-old, proprietary HP 3000" in describing the system. Word circulated in the community, and a letter-writing campaign to set the record straight yielded a big response. Reporter Martin Garvey at InfoWeek told SIGIMAGE chair Ken Sletten, "We have never gotten so many letters for any section story, maybe even news stories." (Whatever his mode of description, Garvey is to be commended for picking up the e3000 rebranding story, one that got away from other publications such as Computerworld and PC Week. JavaWorld's Julie Salzmann ran a brief item on the rebranding in her Feb. 21 issue as well. You can read the InfoWeek story at http://www.informatio nweek.com/773/hp.htm).

Two of the e3000 community's letters appeared in the Feb. 28 issue of InfoWeek, out of only three pubished. NewsWire contributor Andreas Schmidt wrote under "Forever Young" that "For me, it's not surprising that the HP 3000 goes Internet. In my company, and HP 3000 has served part of our intranet for at least three years. So what's old about the HP 3000? The system remains young -- that's why it has lived for more than 25 years."

3000 solutions provider Birket Foster had his letter published as well under the title "Old Reliable." He said, tongue firmly in cheek, that "I'm surprised Hewlett-Packard let you write about the best-kept secret in corporate America." Foster added that "The fact that it's so reliable, and users measure mean time between failures in years, makes it invisible to management of companies that use it."

Wide editing tool available for free

Wyell Grunwald of Alcoa Engineered Products is offering a free utility to split large record-width e3000 files for easier editing. A teaser post on the Internet on Friday reported, "WIDED allows you to split apart a large record width file, KSAM file, SPOOL file, or TurboImage dataset into smaller record width file pieces. After editing these small record width file pieces, WIDED can then be used to combine the small record width file pieces back into a large record width file (less than or equal to 9999 characters wide) or into a TurboImage dataset. WIDED can be used to change key fields in a dataset, or unload / reload a database to disk files. You can get your free copy by e-mailing him at Wyell.Grunwald@Alcoa.com.