Number 91 (Update of Volume 8, Issue 12)

HP reminds you to shop soon

HP floated its October edition of "Customer Times" through the e-mail universe last week, and the PDF publication included a statement that most HP 3000 users have already decided whether to move off the platform or stay. That's news to us, since we've located one customer after another who still monitors the transition news on issues like HP's plans for the MPE source code. Source code and post-2006 support options are still keeping customers on guard about their 3000 futures. Homesteading customers outnumber migration-bound companies for now, perhaps because staying put for the next year or more is less risky and capital-intensive than starting the drive toward HP-UX, IBM, Dell or other options. We don't believe the facts support HP's view that nearly everything has been decided in this market.

Apparently, neither does HP, according to its Customer Times. Its publication included a warning that just a few more weeks remain to order HP 3000 systems from HP. That buying advice that would suggest perhaps not everything is neatly settled on the 3000 frontier. Orders for new systems submitted by Oct. 31 will be processed even through next year – meaning you might schedule delivery of the 3000 system for the next fiscal year to help on budgets.

HP's customer advice also included hopeful notes for its homesteading customers: "HP will also remove MPE-specific diagnostic passwords after 2006, for customers who wish to continue to use their e3000s."

The vendor might not have a lot of choice in that matter, even though it can delay the dropping of those passwords for another three years. 3000 customers and service providers are starting to talk about the infamous "IBM Consent Decree," a 40-year US legal action that ensured independent IBM equipment leasing and trading businesses, third-party IBM equipment maintenance businesses, and plug-compatible processor and peripherals businesses. Customers of HP 3000s are just starting to talk about the Decree as a legal foothold for getting whatever HP has – passwords, documentation – to keep using the 3000 once HP stops supporting the platform. HP's intentions about the 3000 after 2006might be less confrontational than a government decree would require, but it's hard to say for sure. Few details about HP plans for that 2007-and-later period have surfaced during the two years since HP's 2001 end of support announcement. Authorized HP resellers we have interviewed don't even have details on how to sell or where to order the add-on N-Class CPUs that HP mentioned in this month's Customer Times. N-Class owners can buy those additional processors until October of 2004, according to HP.

Database alternative adds security

After our summertime report on the Pervasive.SQL database alternative in play at HP 3000 ISV AMS, the database provider has come out with a new release that boosts security features, replicates smarter and integrates with advanced audit capabilities. The new V8 Security version of Pervasive.SQL embeds a security solution by encrypting data during transmission and storage. The company points out that the majority of security breaches take place from inside a company, where packet sniffers and the like could siphon off the most essential corporate resource.

At the same time the company announced that its AuditMaster add-on product gives companies a way to track everything that happens to a database: "who did what, when, where and how." AuditMaster is a solution that Pervasive acquired from ThinkNet this spring and then engineered so no developer need change their Pervasive.SQL apps to use it.

The company also released the latest round of its data replication solution, DataExchange, in versions for both real-time backup and data synchronization. DataExchange can step in for database backups according to the model from Pervasive, a company whose resellers serve the small to medium sized businesses so typical in the 3000 market. The solution runs on the Windows/Intel platform, and as our June article noted, it is right in line with HP 3000 shops' size: small to medium (SMB), in most cases. Thousands of companies offer apps built around Pervasive, too.

Pervasive.SQL V8 Security single-seat desktop workgroup engines are priced at $25, and a full client-server engine starts at $845 for a six-user license. DataExchange costs $995 for workgroup engines and $4,995 for server engines; the AuditMaster is on special at $1,495 until the end of the year. There's more coming in the story, too: Pervasive bought an extract, transform and load (ETL) company in Data Junction, and DJ's DJCosmos will bring a new dimension to the Pervasive story once that deal closes later this month.

We're aware that a serious part of the 3000 community will be forced away from the platform over the next several years. HP's end of support in 2006 will chase off some sites, and Windows and Dell look like an attractively-priced alternative for these customers. It looks like the Pervasive solution offers a platform for apps, one that's in keeping with the SMB spirit of the 3000 market.

Amisys updates on technical progress

HP 3000 healthcare app provider Amisys Synertech released its HP-UX alternative Amisys Advance in July, a story we covered in the June issue of the 3000 NewsWire. Now users of the software are having a conference call of the Amisys Technical subcommittee on Tuesday, October 28 from noon to 1 PM (CST). The number for the conference call is 918.583.3445 - conference code is 343724.

The call will include a review of comments about last month's Amisys users conference; implementation issues lessons learned and migration plans; and news from vendors who serve the Amisys market including iMaxSoft, Taurus Software, Robelle and Transoft. For more information about what's on next week's agenda, contact David Babcock, MIS Director at UCare Minnesota, at dbabcock@ucare.org.

IBM offers iSeries compute service – not just apps, but on tap

Remember Apps on Tap? HP's idea of 1999 was to configure big honking HP 3000s in HP datacenters, then let MPE application providers serve new customers by hosting apps on these HP 3000s. The Internet was the vehicle to make the magic of no-server computing back then, and now IBM looks like it's coming to the same conclusion for its iSeries alternative.

Since we last visited the iSeries on the NewsWire's pages, IBM has driven its On Demand initiative through the business server line. On Demand is a way to use more horsepower as you need it. Now the vendor is selling compute time to its customers directly in its new Virtual Server Service. Customers can tap into virtual server capacity on hosted IBM eServers, including the iSeries as well as xSeries (Intel-based), and pSeries (IBM's Unix).

IBM was correct in saying that it's the first vendor to offer businesses a choice of Intel-based, Unix-based, or Linux-based server processing and network capacity delivered on demand. But IBM was not the first computer company to offer remotely-delivered virtual server capacity. Apps on Tap never took off when HP offered it to 3000 ISVs, but it was in play a full two years before IBM got around to doing much the same thing when Big Blue introduced Linux virtual services on eServer zSeries mainframes in July of 2002.

Some important differences exist between HP's 1999 plan and IBM's new offering. First, customers can scale their compute power down as well as upward in On Demand. Second, all of the IBM server families are participating in Virtual Server. This isn't just for servers the vendor is having a hard time selling as industry-standard choices. Customers of Virtual Server will be charged a one-time setup fee, followed by variable monthly recurring charges for the computing capacity consumed.

Of course, if that setup sounds like time-sharing to you more mature IT professionals, be assured this is much better. After all, it's got the benefit of close to three decades of technical improvement going for the time-share concept. IBM says Virtual Server can be 30 percent cheaper than installing those servers in-house.

Top-ranked HP server also gets end of life

Even being fast won't save an HP server from the vendor's end of life. The top-ranked HP server in the Top500 list of supercomputing sites is an HP AlphaServer, a computer HP will discontinue just as assuredly as it stops selling HP 3000s on Oct. 31. The TOP500 project was started in 1993 to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing. Twice a year, a list of the sites operating the 500 most powerful computer systems is assembled and released. The best performance on the Linpack benchmark is used as performance measure for ranking the computer systems.

HP just rolled out the last of the AlphaServer line this week, a 64-processor model. An 8,092-processor configuration of AlphaServer at the Los Alamos National supercomputing lab sits at No. 2 on the Top500 list this month, and AlphaServers represent HP at Numbers 9 and 10 of the list, too. Meanwhile, HP's new Integrity Itanium 2 systems could climb no higher than No. 8 on the performance chart. The next-fastest Itanium system from HP was at No. 46. You can look over the speed charts at www.top500.org/list/2003/06/

A new list of Top500 rankings is coming out next month. One of the AlphaServer's operating environments, OpenVMS, is being ported to Itanium. The other, Tru64, is being discontinued, though not as completely as HP is dropping MPE – HP has promised to put parts of Tru64, a Unix variant, into HP-UX. OpenVMS got improvements announced for it this week, a fate that MPE/iX did not earn from HP.

HP employs 200 "OpenVMS Ambassadors" who present OpenVMS topics "to any audience, provide in-depth product presentations, product non-disclosures, and design system configurations of the highest complexity." The Web page at h71000.www7.hp.com/ambassadors shows what a group of dedicated HP employees look like who support a non-commodity operating environment – one that has perhaps 30 times the installed number of servers as the HP 3000.

No Malta meeting for migration boost

After we reported in the last Online Extra that HP was considering a meeting at a Malta retreat to push the HP Integrity server as a 3000 alternative, we heard from one of the HP 3000 European organizers of the event. Response for the HP invitation didn't enable the meeting to make. HP wanted 50 of its European 3000 partners to round up a couple of customers each to ensure they could book a nice hotel on the Mediterranean island. Notice was short, but the price of Malta hotel rooms and last-minute flights to the sunny isle was attractive.

Nobody organized an HP 3000 customer event better than the managers in Europe. The platform got a lavish 25th Birthday party in Germany, the only such a celebration anywhere in the world. We even saw simultaneous translation for customers at the "Let's Go e!" meeting in November, 2000. The NewsWire attended that meeting in Amsterdam, and we saw lots of good ideas on how to make the system perform over the Internet and through Web interfaces. "This was really a success, where customers talked about their e-business references with simultaneous translation (5 languages) to partners and other customers from 17 countries," said HP's Horst Kanert, who wrote us after last month's Online Extra item appeared about Malta.

Alas, HP hasn't been able to attract 3000 customers to events this year, after announcing it will stop selling the system. "These days, events like HP e3000 partner conferences and other customer-oriented migration workshops get less registrations, where the registration is for free, and a lot of no-shows," Kanert said. HP was prepared to show success stories at the Malta event about migrations away from the platform, an agenda item we overlooked in our report last month.

Kanert remains on mission to show an alternative to the 3000 to the European partners' customer base. After all, after Oct. 31 HP has nothing to sell 3000 sites except alternatives.

"We will postpone this [Malta] event, or distribute this to single-country events next year," he said. "I did not assume that our internal and partner-oriented HP 3000 info goes public to the NewsWire." While we don't tout anything as clever as "Inside HP" coverage, we're always grateful to have friends in the 3000 community who share what they hear about HP's current sales efforts to the 3000 customer base.