HP cuts costs on its Unix trade-in plans

“Free” conversion creeps closer to low-cost with discounts

HP has been promising its 3000 customers for more than a year that they can convert their systems to HP 9000s at no cost. Last month the deal came closer to its proposed price, when the vendor announced a 50 percent discount on HP-UX licenses for such converted systems.

While converting HP 3000 hardware to HP 9000 systems has always been free — the systems are identical in design — shifting the operating system software in such a switch can easily cost tens of thousands of dollars. HP does offer a Basic Edition of HP-UX for free in its conversion kit. But at the most recent Solutions Symposium in Valley Forge, even HP’s own Unix experts didn’t recommend Basic HP-UX for businesses running mission critical applications.

“Anybody who’s running a database needs the Online Journaled File System,” said Marty Poniatowski, who briefed Symposium attendees on the nuances of using HP-UX in the enterprise. The JFS software acts like the HP 3000’s Transaction Manager to help preserve data in case of outages. Basic-level HP-UX is for running Web servers and less critical applications, he added.

The JFS software isn’t included in Basic HP-UX. Neither is Mirror Disk/UX for failover protection, Glance Plus for performance measurement, or the OpenView performance agent.

HP’s Enterprise HP-UX includes all of those items and more, but it costs $5,000 per processor before channel discounts are taken. A Mission-Critical Edition of HP-UX adds ServiceGuard, HP’s Workload Manager and other applications, and it costs $10,000 per processor. These license fees are now being discounted by 50 percent in a new offering to 3000 sites doing a migration to HP-UX.

Poniatowski, who works with enterprise-class customers such as Pitney Bowes in the New York City area, said “Virtually every customer I have goes beyond this [Basic] operating environment.” One exception might be fundamental Web servers, but “If you’re going to run a mission-critical application that’s really important to your business, at a minimum you’d want to mirror your disks and perform quick system recovery with Online JFS.”

HP is stepping in with more discounts for trade-ins to reduce the cost of its “free” conversion. In such a swap, customers would turn in their licenses for MPE/iX, including their IMAGE/SQL database, for an HP-UX license that doesn’t include a database. Mike Schneck of HP’s 3000 business said upgrades to the Mission Critical and Enterprise editions of HP-UX will now cost the customers doing the trading in half as much.

“We feel that’s very attractive to the customers, based on the products that are bundled into those two operating environments,” Schneck said. HP is also discounting individual HP-UX features such as Mirrored Disk/UX and MC ServiceGuard, or Online JFS software as part of the trade-in deal.

Schneck said the discounts will expire on March 1, 2004. He noted that Glance is running on many HP 3000 systems, and HP didn’t want customers to “have to buy Glance as an add-on product” at no discount.