HP points to next fork in MPE road

HP’s UK road map briefing includes notice of fork to create separate IA-64 version of MPE

Hewlett-Packard gave 3000 customers in the UK a look into the future of the computer with an extensive trip across the road map — one that showed a fork ahead in the operating system road.

3000 Product Marketing Manager Vicki Symonds said there would be a fork of the 3000’s operating system when IA-64 boxes ship in a few years. The comment confirms a time when the Commercial Systems Division will once again support more than one version of MPE, just as it did in the late 1980s and early ’90s.

The comment was delivered as part of HP Users ’99, the annual conference and trade show hosted by the HP Computer Users Association in the UK. The show in London featured Symonds’ talk and an e-services keynote delivered by CSY Worldwide Marketing Manager Christine Martino, as well as a management roundtable, vendor show, and training from 3000 suppliers Lund Performance, Bradmark Technologies and BizNetTech.net

The user group announced it had pre-registration attendance of more than 800, including customers of all HP’s enterprise computing platforms. But sessions were intimately attended, giving users plenty of opportunity to network and interact with speakers. Moving the conference back to its London roots prompted higher registration than the 1998 version of the show, held in the more remote setting of Telford.

A fork ahead

Symonds drew an un-enviable speaking slot of the morning after the conference’s social event, an glittering evening of dinner and dancing at the famed London Hippodrome. Her talk followed the fundamentals of CSY’s Platform Planning presentation at HP World earlier this year, but added details on MPE release futures as well as an Apache Web server update.

“We will have a fork in the operating system,” Symonds said. “When we go to IA-64, we’ll require a whole separate release of MPE.”

Symonds identified this IA-64 timeframe as “beyond 2001. Our goal is to have a migration path similar to the migration path we did from MPE V to MPE/iX. We want customers not to have to recompile applications, to take applications and run them in compatibility mode.”

Next-generation 3000s in the more immediate future will operate with the 7.0 release of MPE/iX, Symonds said. HP will be supporting these N-Class servers that use the PA-8500 chip in parallel with the new IA-64 3000s.

Symonds said that HP’s commitment to PA-RISC on the 3000 is firm through 2005, with versions of the PA-RISC chip up through PA-8900 already being planned for 3000 models (see chart).

“PA-RISC is probably just as powerful as the similar IA-64 chip,” Symonds said. She reconfirmed what CSY’s Dave Snow reported at HP World: CSY will be bypassing the Merced chip in the IA-64 line (recently renamed Itanium by Intel) in favor of the McKinley processor. The chart of processor plans doesn’t show the IA-64 line passing PA-RISC in performance until the the third IA-64 generation, currently being called Deerfield.

Symonds said HP is also considering the new L-Class server, introduced this year for HP-UX systems, as a mid-2001 replacement for the 9x8 low-end servers.

6.5 to carry full Apache

Although HP planned to have its version of the Apache Web Server ready for the Express 2 version of MPE/iX 6.0, the software will ship on an interim release vehicle yet to be determined. That’s because Express 2 “is going out later than we wanted,” according to HP. HP said that official support for Apache on 3000s will commence with the 6.5 version of MPE/iX, and 6.0 with patches.

Symonds said that HP considers 6.5 to be a growth and increased-capacity release for MPE/iX. But the release also looks to be the most likely candidate to provide supported Java and Apache versions, which might give it a broader target market than just the high-end shops. Apache is only available from the CSY Jazz Web server at the moment, with patches, and isn’t yet officially supported.

“We support Apache today on a best-effort basis,” said CSY engineer Barbara Dubbert, whose talk on LDAP and Apache followed Symonds’. Dubbert said Apache would be bundled into the 6.5 release of MPE/iX. “We know people want a 6.0-supported version of Apache,” Dubbert said, but that support will only be available by adding patches onto 6.0.

She said HP will complete the port of the RSA BSAFE library by the end of the year, which will be used to build a secure version of Apache. CSY is still working to determine who will create this Apache version; Monterey Software Group is a candidate for the assignment.

State of the Euro market

Vendors at the conference attested to a healthy HP 3000 space, but some noted a slowdown in product orders they attributed to the onset of the Y2K crossover. Rumors were circulating about a pullout from the 3000 by both Glaxo and Shell, two of the larger 3000 customers in Europe. HP promises to take steps to shore up those defections with focused visits from Emmet Hayes, the UK and Northern Europe regional marketing manager.

Hayes said he saw both kinds of customers in Europe: those who have frozen purchases and development until after the first of the year, “and those who have completed their Y2K testing and they’re getting ready for the projects they’re going to implement next year. They need their [systems] now.” Hayes mentioned that Smith-Gardner is finding new business for the system in Europe as well.

On the plus side, 3000 customers using the Coda/3000 financial solutions were enjoying new hope for their application’s enhancement. When the 3000 community refused to migrate to Open Coda based on Unix platforms, Baan, which bought Coda last year, gave the Coda development team a mandate to return to 3000 enhancements. One story at the show described negotiations afoot to determine how long the development window was to stay open.

“Coda/3000 is better developed and more functional than any of the other Coda versions, and I think Baan was surprised when the 3000 base said ‘No,’ ” Hayes said. Working with Bradmark’s WinMPE, the company will add a GUI interface and is now going after new business, he said.

Notes on XP256

Customers at the conference management roundtable — a meeting held informally in the back of the meeting room — asked HP to help them sort out the RAID storage strategy in the wake of changing alliances with EMC. HP’s Nick Dagg explained that the company wants to include EMC Symmetrix in a strategy for Storage Area Networks, but the main product is now the HP XP256 SureStore arrays.

“We don’t believe the EMC architecture is capable of going beyond the 5 Nines,” Dagg said, referring to HP’s reliability goal of 99.999 percent uptime. HP knows it will have to move to full-time computing in the future, and storage is an essential component of that promise.

“We wanted to develop [the EMC solution] for ourselves and add some intrinsic value, and EMC didn’t want to go into an OEM agreement with us,” Dagg added. “We also had to look at profitability, and at the same time we were having discussions with Hitachi. There we could take a newer design which is fault tolerant and add our own value to it in firmware.”

Dagg said HP continues to stand behind its customers using the EMC products for support, although those customers do rely on EMC engineers to provide the actual service on the Symmetrix systems. “We’re absolutely committed to developing a whole environment and integrating Symmetrix into it,” he said. “HP will embrace as many storage platforms as possible. A storage area network has to be open.”

Dagg pointed out that the EMC devices currently dial into EMC service headquarters, something that keeps an HP customer from having a single point of support for all devices.