Webcast touts Express 1, responds on merger

HP struggles with audio while educating customers

After problems with the audio of its latest Web broadcast cut short its scripted presentations, HP’s e3000 division (CSY) sounded off on worries about the platform’s survival through HP’s proposed acquisition of Compaq. But like the pre-recorded sounds of customers trying to testify about the speed of the new systems, CSY’s message about the merger’s 3000 impact was unclear.

Customers submitted merger questions as part of an extended Q&A portion of the Webcast, a segment that HP moved to after pre-recorded interviews were broadcast with inaudible sound levels. The Q&As in the Webcasts have become a lively exchange between customers and CSY experts, with questions covering as wide a range of territory as management roundtables at user conferences.

CSY used the latest Webcast to tout the speed of its new systems, which require the just-shipping Express 1 release of MPE/iX 7.0 to access multiple-processor configurations in N-Class and A-Class computers. Few details emerged in the pre-recorded presentations which HP hadn’t already covered in its HP World presentations about the new operating system. One customer said their production run was benchmarked at the HP labs on a single three-CPU, 550 MHz N-Class in three hours, instead of the eight hours they experienced with an older eight-processor, Series 997 HP 3000.

“This release is really about our high-end performance systems,” said Mike Schneck, CSY’s software product marketing manager. “Our primary focus is on the multi-way systems now enabled with Express 1.” Multiple-processor versions of the N-Class systems began shipping last month.

Schneck noted functionality from the MPE/iX 6.5 release now being re-introduced with Express 1: high availability offerings Cluster/iX and High Availability Failover; the 1.3 version of the Java Software Developer’s Kit, with speed increases of two to five times over earlier Java releases; Samba 2.0.7; and a new 1.3.14 version of Apache/iX Web Server which supports Dynamic Shared Objects for easier modifications to Web servers.

Schneck also gave away 10 copies of the Secure version of Apache/iX during the Webcast. The division is moving the Secure server to free product status sometime in the next year, but at the moment it remains a for-sale product.

The Webcast saw HP begin to stress the value in selling all e3000s with IMAGE/SQL. “One of the things that differentiates the 3000 from other servers out there is we’re the only one that comes with an award-winning bundled database management system,” said Webcast host George Stachnik.

The Express 1 release also offers some new territory for systems other than the newest e3000 models. MPE/iX supports up to 12,000 processes, up from 8,190 in prior release. The new limit permits customers to support more users and more intensive processing on any system that can run MPE/iX 7.0: Series 9x8, 99x and 9x9 HP 3000s.

HP also announced a hands-on training course for the new Express 1 release, a three-day session with heavy emphasis on configuring the newest e3000s. The course also explains how to use STM, the new diagnostic software included with releases 6.5 and 7.0 that varies widely in operation from SYSDIAG. Details on the $1,600 HP course, scheduled for November in Chicago and January 2002 in Atlanta, are at www.hp.com/education/courses/u1621s.html.

A one-day course on the new Express 1 release is being offered at Tech Group University on December 4, taught by Paul Edwards. Tech Group is taking registration for the $600 class in Hagerstown, Md. at www.techgroupmd.com.

Questions, merger comments

After a few minutes of questions about support for disk mirroring, boot drives greater than 4Gb and other chestnuts often asked, HP began to address a number of questions about the impact of the merger on the 3000 product line. Customers asked about a published report in Network World magazine, wondering if the system was likely to survive the merger.

“I sure wish I knew the answer to that,” said Kriss Rant, CSY’s manager in charge of developer relations and a division veteran. “I don’t know any more than you do.”

“Whenever there’s a large merger like this, the press has a field day,” host Stachnik added, “speculating on exactly what it’s going to mean. I can tell you that nobody in the 3000 business has received any marching orders from Compaq or upper HP management that OpenVMS, MPE or any other operating system is supposed to survive or not. There’s been no decisions made on that. Don’t give too much credence to it.”

Platform Planning Manager Dave Snow noted that HP did a “total roll of our product line in February, and we’re delivering multiple processor support. I certainly think you can expect there will be support of MPE for many years to come.”

Other questions on the merger got a broad brush answer from Stachnik. “The correct answer at this point is, ‘We really don’t know,’ ” he said. “There are lots of open questions about whether that merger is even going to happen. The SEC needs to look at it, and there’s been all sorts of speculation in the press. How it’s going to impact the 3000 — we simply don’t know at this point. We’ve gotten no marching orders one way or the other, and I’m not anticipating we’re getting them anytime in the near future.”

Other questions in the Q&A covered the performance gains for new 7.0 users not running the newest hardware. Kevin Cooper of CSY said that in moving from 6.5 to Express 1 of 7.0, “there really won’t be much of an impact at all on a [Series] 918. We see going from 6.5 to 7.0 as having pretty much no performance impact.”

The shift may well be more noticeable for customers upgrading directly to 7.0 Express 1 from MPE/iX 6.0. That kind of upgrade is possible, according to another question in the Q&A session. Changes to MPE/iX in 6.5 have been carried forward to 7.0.

When the 6.5 release first surfaced in 2000, Cooper said that accessing MPE fixed-length flat files, through FREADs and FWRITEs, will cost more in performance than it did in the 6.0 release. It’s a cost related to HP’s decision to provide access to files bigger than 4Gb for nearly all of its 3000 installed base, instead of just those systems running with 64-bit PA-RISC processors.