While the HP World conference kicks off with latest on the e3000 in Philadelphia this month, down the street from the city’s convention center the story of HP 3000 servers is old, reliable news. At the Philadelphia Daily News and the Philadelphia Inquirer, MPE/iX has been at the heart of Philly news operations for years.

The city newspapers, located just a few blocks down Broad Street from the site of this year’s HP World conference, use three HP e3000 servers, according to HP system administrator Walter Hall. The Daily News and the Inquirer, both morning papers which are operated by Philadelphia Newspapers, Inc., have their circulation and advertising management systems hosted on MPE software. More than 565,000 copies daily and 804,000 Sunday copies of the two newspapers, and the ad revenue they generate, are managed daily by the HP 3000s.

Three Series 969/220 HP e3000s run at the newspaper headquarters, serving more than 150 users across its Broad Street offices as well as the printing plant for the papers in suburban New Jersey. The systems run circulation software from GEAC (formerly Collier-Jackson) and advertising applications from Neasi-Weber, as well as many specialized business applications developed in-house. Hall, whose job involves keeping those users online, says the HP 3000s are essential to the newspaper operations.

“The 3000s have truly been workhorses for us,” Hall said, “our main workhorse.” The newspapers also use servers from Sun, IBM OS/390s, and Windows NT systems. Hall said the other servers send and receive data to and from the 3000 using File Transfer Protocol (FTP) capabilities built into the e3000.

“We use FTP rather extensively, from other environments to the HP 3000 and from the 3000 to other environments,” Hall said. “We’re FTPing constantly between the 3000s and the NT servers and the OS/390.” More than 30 servers in all are at work at the newspapers.

There’s a lot of data to be moved between the systems. The newspapers have a terabyte of data capacity in an EMC disk array, attached not to only the three 3000s but to the NT, Sun and IBM servers at the same time. Some of the non-3000 servers perform publishing and data warehousing activities for the newspapers.

One other HP 3000 969 acts as a development system for the newspapers. Programmers create custom reports for use with the circulation and advertising applications. Having separate machines for each kind of system lets the newspapers “isolate our development processes, and our advertising system can be isolated as well” for maintenance and management simplicity, Hall said.

Once a month the systems get rebooted on a schedule, “just to give them a break.” Downtime was limited to time to replace a disk drive over the past year. The systems are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. “Advertising systems are the big workhorse, because there’s constant changes in the ads.”