Changes in HP’s tape offerings and peripheral connections kept customers searching for a way out of an discontinued product dilemma at the Interex HP 3000 Solutions Symposium. During the Technical Management roundtable, users of half-inch tape drives learned support for their devices is ending, even though US government requirements for tape aren’t going away.

Attendees at the meeting included a large number of users of the 9x7 Series HP 3000s. Many of these “Wright Brothers” class systems have peripherals attached that HP won’t be supporting soon, either because the age of the tape device or an interface for the drives which will be falling off HP support.
Half-inch tape drives used with the 9x7 systems have HP-IB interfaces. The interfaces aren’t supported in versions of MPE/iX starting with the March release of MPE/iX 6.5.

“If you have HP-IB peripherals connected to a 9x7 server — which is a high likelihood in its timeframe — then the HP-IB peripherals will not be supported when you roll to 6.5,” said Product Planning Manager Dave Snow. “You’re going to have to make a choice: stay in the old world with the HP-IB peripherals through 6.0, or you can get rid of your HP-IB peripherals and go to the later sets of peripherals and roll up to 6.5.”

The solution to remain in the old world with 6.0 will have its limits, however. HP will end support for MPE/iX 6.0 at the end of 2001. The 9x7s will go off support in April of 2002.

Customers at the meeting pointed out that half-inch tape is still a required backup medium for the US government. “There’s still a lot of governmental agencies that will only accept half-inch tape for data transmission,” said Duane Percox, partner in the K-12 application provider QSS.

Submissions from customers — such as the many credit unions running HP 3000s — must be on half-inch tape. At the symposium, HP bragged that 24 of the top 100 US credit unions run on e3000 systems using Summit Information’s Spectrum application.

“The Summit folks are trying to cover their customers, because in the financial arena, half-inch tape is a very important interchange medium,” Snow said. HP isn’t selling the half-inch devices for 3000s anymore, although they’re available on the used market.