3000 NewsWire Online Extra Welcome to our 31st 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 last First Class issue. This service is an exclusive to our paid subscribers. We e-mail you this file between the First Class issues you receive by mail, updating the stories you've read and adding articles that have developed between issues. HP lifts production hold on 3000s The CSY labs have lifted a production hold on HP 3000s that it had set in place as a result of a bug in MPE/iX 5.5 PowerPatch 5. A MPEKXJ3 repair patch is available through HP's Electronic Support Center Web site (http://us-support.external.hp.com), and HP expects to ship a PowerPatch 6 for 5.5 this week that will also fix the problem. Production holds are a rare thing for HP 3000s; the last one anybody could recall happened sometime in 1996 as a result of faulty firmware in processor boards. HP has killed off PowerPatch 5 as a result of the bug, a faulty performance enhancement in patch MPEKX79. Don't install the PowerPatch if you haven't, HP advises. Date Intrinsics fixed with PowerPatch 6 HP posted notice on its Jazz Web site that the PowerPatch 6 version of MPE/iX includes a patch to fix the HPDATE intrinsics. The software didn't comply with an HP Corporate standard for Year 2000 which was drafted after the intrinsics were released. PowerPatch 6 also makes System Dictionary/iX compliant with the HP Corporate Y2K standard. A full list of the Year 2000 patch updates is available at the link above, but also includes RPG and Performance Collector/iX. One notable exception: Allbase/SQL, which is listed as having two Corporate compliant releases: PowerPatch 5, and 6.0. Engineers report that customers can migrate directly from PowerPatch 4 to PowerPatch 6. PowerPatches, by design, include all previous patches in prior PowerPatches. The obvious exclusion to this is the faulty performance patch — which was in PowerPatch 5 but NOT in PowerPatch 6. 6.0 resolves the DBUTIL ERASE bug In a stroke of luck for the HP 3000 division, MPE/iX 6.0 doesn't carry the buggy performance patch that can scramble IMAGE datasets. 6.0, which HP's Kriss Rant said was on schedule to ship at the end of October, closed the door to new patches and enhancements before the buggy patch was ready. That means if you've got PowerPatch 5 of MPE/iX 5.5 installed, one way to get an HP 3000 back to a safe operating configuration is to install 6.0 when it arrives from HP. The 6.0 release will be automatically shipped to every HP 3000 customer on a current support contract, so you don't have to order it. There are other reasons to install 6.0 -- like the Samba/iX file/resource sharing software, Java/iX, multiple job queues for better performance and the first supported DNS software for HP 3000s. But fixing a bug that can perform a faulty DBUTIL ERASE and therefore scramble datasets seems more urgent than any of that. Want more motivation to install 6.0? How about fixes to HP software products [RPG and System Dictionary, for example] to qualify them for HP's comprehensive definition Year 2000 compliance? Or a working HPDATEDIFF intrinsic that appeared to be broken in PowerPatch 4? There's nothing like a mainline, platform release of MPE/iX to iron out some of the QA issues that spring up on PowerPatches. How ready is 6.0? Log on and see Don't expect any delay in the shipment of MPE/iX 6.0 by the end of this month. The operating system is already at work at HP, driving the HP 300 Series 957 Jazz Web site that CSY maintains for its own product updates and customer communications. The server has an up to date list of which MPE/iX release to use for Year 2000 compliance. 6.0 has a few lightly-used subsystems -- Allbase/BRW and BRW-Desk/iX -- that are still waiting on fixes for compliance with the HP Corporate Year 2000 standard. Check that HP tour calendar for next month We got a date wrong and left a city off the HP Customer Advisory Council road tour mentioned in the October FlashPaper. Atlanta gets a Nov. 5 stop on the tour that brings 3000 division leaders like GM Harry Sterling and R&D chief Winston Prather to a town near you. And the correct date for the all-day meeting in Chicago [the Elk Grove, Ill. HP office] is Nov. 4. HP is inviting CIOs and MIS directors to the meeting to hear about the HP 3000's prospects and listen to customer feedback on what to do next. Prather said the meetings are designed around HP's tradition of bringing key 3000 customers to the CSY labs in a Customer Advisory Council meeting, usually held once a year to help CSY get input on products and strategy. Other tour dates are Toronto on Nov. 2, Paramus, N.J. on November 6, Cupertino on November 12, Seattle on Nov. 16 and wrapping Dallas on Nov. 17. Contact the HP sales offices in those cities — where the presentations will be held — for details on how to attend. The Rego tour takes flight, too Adager founder and developer Alfredo Rego is making his own tour in November to speak to the HP 3000 customer base and other HP customers attending Regional User Group meetings across the US. Rego, who manages to weave practical advice about database management with strategic thinking about information services, starts his tour with an appearance in Denver on Nov. 2 at an all-day Rocky Mountain User Group meeting at the Denver City Center Marriott. Register before Oct. 28 and get a Beanie Baby by RSVPing to LeeAnn Naeve (303.971.8237) or Gail Rice (303.743.5322, gail.p.rice@kp.org). You can find more details on that meeting at http://www.interex ..org/lug/UStates/Colorado/RMRUG.html Other Alfredo dates are: Baltimore (BWRUG) Tue, Nov 10th: Location: HP office in Rockville, MD Time: Speaking 1:00 pm Contact: Nick Demos 410-788-6777 nmdemos@home.com or Mark Huntsman, HP 301-258-2271 mark_huntsman@hp.com Houston (GHRUG) Thu, Nov 12th: Location: Southwest Hilton Hotel, Houston, TX Time: Speaking 9:00 am (approximate) Contact: Richard Pringle 281-333-8009 richard.pringle@lmco.com Chicago (CRUG), Tue, Nov 17th: Location: HP office in Naperville, IL 1200 East Diehl Road Time: Speaking 9:00-11:00am (coffee 8:30am) Contact: Mark Redwood 847-673-5650 mredwood@FRInc.com Cleveland (NEORUG), Wed, Nov 18th: Location: HP office in Strongsville, OH 15885 Sprague Road Time: Speaking 1:00-3:00pm (lunch at noon) Contact: Gene Calai 440-777-6300 GeneCalai@Quadax.com Cincinnati (CINMUG), Thu, Nov 19th: Location: Quality Inn Riverview in Covington, KY 668 W. Fifth Street Time: Speaking 7:00-9:00pm (hospitality 5pm, dinner 6pm) Contact: Dave Hoesl 606-283-7266 dhoesl@fuse.net HP talks about PA-RISC future releases HP issued a too-brief press release about its plans for the PA-RISC processor lineup while presenting at the Microprocessor Forum in San Jose. The announcement appears to be aimed at convincing customers that PA-RISC still has a lot of life left in it, even though all HP seems to be talking about is IA-64 and the Merced line. HP talked about a PA-8600, scheduled for release in the same Year 2000 as Merced, at a clock speed of 560Mhz. This is a serious increase in chip cycle frequency from the PA-8500s, which will make their HP customer debut early next year at 360Mhz in HP 9000 Visualize Workstations. A 440Mhz version of the chip will power the V-Class of HP 9000s, which HP reported would be introduced before the end of the year. Watching the clock speed of PA-RISC processors is one way to gauge how much gas is left in their tanks. HP used to crow about how its RISC designs didn't need the high clock speeds that Digital's Alpha chips needed. Now it looks like PA-RISC is in the same speed limit. Hardware engineers will tell you that clock speed is only one of many factors in performance, including bus throughput, memory integration and IO bandwidth. HP reported in one press release that it's four months ahead of schedule on the PA-8500 release. That early delivery of the 8500 isn't likely to translate to early availability of HP 3000s based on the system. That's because these PA-8500 HP 3000s are going to need an operating system release beyond the next one, which will let applications employ the first 64 bit capabilities like large files and large memory. HP 3000 Alliance Development Manager Kriss Rant said that later 64-bit version of MPE/iX will appear after another one gets shipped in the Year 2000. Rant described the 8500-based HP 3000s as "next generation HP 3000s," since they will be ready for the latest IA-64 processors with a board swap. HP also mentioned a PA-8700 (due in 2001), PA-8800 and PA-8900, but there's no word yet on which of these processors will find their way in HP 3000s. HP's PA-RISC press release did mention that "today's HP-UX, Windows NT and MPE/iX applications will run unchanged on IA-64." That's the binary compatibility promise for software, the second one HP 3000 customers have heard. HP kept the first promise when going from Classic HP 3000s to PA-RISC systems. Two 3000 lessons emerge from this PA-RISC announcement. First, the system really is in HP's corporate IA-64 game plan. (It hasn't been a slam dunk in the past simply because HP said it would be so. Merced boss Rich Sevcik acknowledged the 3000 would be part of the Merced plan as far back as 1994, but then HP waffled in the three years that followed. This time the announcement has come from the divisional level.) The other lesson is that hardware release dates for processors often don't mean much for HP 3000 customers. An HP 3000 which uses the PA 8500 won't be waiting on the processor to ship. It will rely on the availability of a version of MPE/iX that can utilize it. The HP 3000 customer base has a lot higher standards for reliability than some other HP businesses, so engineering to those standards takes a little longer. An MDX you can use is on its way Dynamic Expansion of Master Datasets (MDX) has been available to HP customers since the PowerPatch 4 release of MPE/iX 5.5, but it's in very light use among the customer base. That might be due to the hashing scheme for MDX, which in its current state can exact a high performance penalty in most expansion situations. What's the point of having an MDX -- which is supposed to reduce downtime you'd have to spend manually expanding IMAGE master datasets -- if that takes almost as long to rehash after the dynamic expansion? (It's a rhetorical question.) HP's 3000 database lab could see this, and that's why a version of MDX without the rehashing penalty is close to release. In fact, it's closer than some expected; HP had reported at HP World that the fixed MDX wouldn't be available until the PowerPatch 1 release of MPE/iX 6.0. The latest word is that a site-specific patch of MDX is already in play at selected customer sites, and the fixed MDX is ready to go out to utilities and tools vendors this week. MDX is a feature that could be slowly adopted in the customer base. DDX, the dynamic detail dataset expansion, has been out for almost three years -- but it was only after more expanded use of it in 1997 that HP found a database scrambling bug in it. HP's cutting jobs, but voluntarily HP quietly reported that it will be cutting 2,500 jobs across the board this year, one part of the adjustments the company is making to weather the Asian economic downturn. The positions will be eliminated through voluntary early retirements, a method HP has used in the past to cut its head count. There are currently more than 127,000 people working at HP. The Asian downturn has been a catalyst in the shifts at HP. Reports in the outside press show that CEO Lew Platt is spending his energy getting the company to realize the severity of the situation. One report in Infoworld had Platt sending packets of customer complaint letters to managers in HP — to get them to understand how quality of service pull down HP's growth. At one speech in September, Platt noted that HP's growth in the last five years has been fueled by explosive growth in emerging economies. In Korea HP grew from zero to a billion dollars faster there than it had ever grown to a billion dollars in any other country. Platt said the Korean business will be down below $400 million this year. Platt's solution to the problem runs beyond cutting jobs. News.com quoted him as saying, "You are going to have to find $600 million worth of business somewhere else just to have zero growth this year." It's a good thing the HP 3000 business is up so sharply, and that the HP 3000's fortunes don't ride very heavily on the Asian tiger economies. The problems in Asia came up unexpectedly for Platt and HP. The region is the primary place for the company's contract manufacturing, and even in late March Platt said it wasn't clear if sales would be up or down in Asia. In the same month the company announced a $250 million investment plan in Korean venture companies. HP bought a billion dollars worth of parts and products in South Korea for export in 1997. Watts leaves HP; direct sales push accelerates HP's Dick Watts -- who made news for HP 3000 customers by being the first top-level manager who sat on the HP World management roundtable and listened to customers -- has left the company to head up Silicon Valley startup ConvergeNet. Watts might have made his departure because he'd been shunted outside of HP's main product structure after computer czar Rick Belluzzo left HP for Silicon Graphics. Last year CEO Lew Platt had Watts overseeing several divisions' worth of products. This year HP had Watts managing the corporate level sales force -- but this was a step removed from second-tier management posts like that of Enterprise Systems VP Bill Russell. It's still too early to tell, but it appears HP's sales strategy will take a turn toward direct sales with Watts' departure. CEO Platt announced last week at a Gartner Group conference that HP was hiring several hundred new sales people to engage about 100 of what it calls enterprise accounts directly. Like Belluzzo, his position won't be filled. Copyright 1998, The 3000 NewsWire. All rights reserved.