HP took a little more than three months to tell its HP 3000 customers which improvements it will be working on for the coming year, as the 3000 “virtual” division reported back on the top requests from the 2003 Systems Improvement Ballot (SIB). HP told customers this spring that it wants to see HP 3000 users continue to tell the division what they need through the SIB, even though the vendor will stop selling the server by the end of October. Users, customers and vendors sent in requests through an Interex Web page during February, voting on almost 30 enhancements and some broader-reaching wishes such as “remove the speed limitations on A-Class HP 3000 systems.” To almost nobody’s surprise, HP declined to perform that request to make the A-Class “un-crippled,” as the community’s developers call the enhancement. The proposal would have removed the software constraints that keep the A-Class systems from using all of the horsepower on their PA-RISC processors — an artificial governor that doesn’t exist in the computers’ HP-UX counterparts. HP has touted the extra horsepower in the A-Class HP 9000 versions as a benefit of converting an HP 3000 to an HP 9000. HP’s response to the SIB request said the vendor wants to maintain the price/performance points in the HP 3000 line as it’s configured today, a move that some customers questioned with less than five months remaining on HP’s sales of the 3000. But four other requests — the kind that are more common among SIB enhancements — are now in the virtual division’s to-do list for the months to come.

HP said that it will work on producing a “parking” PowerPatch for the 6.5, 7.0 and 7.5 versions of MPE/iX. But HP’s response to the request explained that the parking release will come in the form of two PowerPatches per year over those three releases through HP’s end of support, meaning at least one those releases won’t get a PowerPatch every year. The “parking” release is a concept that’s been proposed by customers and software vendors to give them a fixed target for consolidating and stabilizing their HP 3000 operations and development. HP’s response appears to schedule such a final, parking release for no earlier than 2004 for MPE/iX 6.5, and not earlier than 2005 for 7.0 and 7.5. That’s because PowerPatches will be scheduled for each release until it drops off HP’s support matrix. The 6.5 release is scheduled to fall off HP support at the end of 2004; HP ends support for 7.0 and 7.5 in December, 2006.

Another SIB request that got a more definitive green light from HP was ensuring that HP 3000s will be able to mount any disk drive up to 1 terabyte in capacity. The staffed project doesn’t ensure that the operating system will be able to use all that space on a volume, but only that the disk can be mounted. HP also agreed to improve the FTP software on the 3000 so it can move files greater than 8Gb in both directions, and fix other problems with the industry standard file transfer software under MPE/iX.

The last SIB request will enable CI functions to call another script as a function. Design work has begun on the project, according to HP engineer Jeff Vance. He also responded to comments from some users about the six requests of the top 10 vote-getters which HP did not agree to perform: the “un-crippling” enhancement described above; putting internal HP documentation of MPE/iX on a public Web site; offering a license of the SS_CONFIG configuration utility to third parties who will be serving the community once HP leaves the field; support of giagbit LAN connectivity; enabling the older Series 9x7 servers to boot the newer MPE/iX 7.0 after Oct. 31; and bundling all of the Allbase database with IMAGE/SQL after HP stops sales of the server. Vance said many of these requests were atypical of the SIB enhancements, which usually propose a fix or extension of HP’s system software. He also promised that HP would update customers on its add-on software such as Allbase at this summer’s HP World conference.