3000 NewsWire

How far has HP's word gotten out?

Last week in our podcast we talked about the pitfalls in announcing a support extension in the shadow of a holiday week. This week we've heard the first report of how that kind of shady introduction is hampering an HP customer. Some of HP, it appears, doesn't know that 3000 support from the vendor is still on sale through 2008.

Herb Stratham of Cerrowire reported that he's gotten the widest variety of answers from HP's reps about continuing his 3000 support from HP beyond 2006. According to Stratham, who's the Manager of Information Systems at the manufacturer:

I have asked several HP personnel about extended support on my HP e3000 model 959KS-400 and received different answers about support — yes, no and maybe.

Maybe HP's message hasn't drifted deep enough into the waters of a company with more than 100,000 on the payroll. Stratham said he'll keep us posted about what reasons HP is giving for flying more than one course in the skies of support.

"The local Service Delivery Manager did not give a reason," he said, "just that support would not be extended past the current contract end date (11/02/06). However, Jeff Vance (of HP Cupertino) has asked me for the “particulars” and said that he would provide answers. We would like to stay on the e3000 as long as possible."

OpenMPE still open for MPE business

Even though HP put off its source code license until at least the end of 2008, the OpenMPE advocates continue to push the vendor for a better HP 3000 future. The group has elections coming up again this spring, a chance to serve the community many of you will be members of for the rest of this decade.

More important than leadership, however, is the 2006 mission for the group. First up, and very soon, will be independent review of MPE/iX build process at HP. The vendor thinks so much of this that it will pay an outside contractor selected by OpenMPE to do this review. The contractor — Mark Klein, formerly a board member and a developer steeped in MPE/iX internals, is a leading candidate for the job — will tell HP how well they've documented the process to create MPE/iX releases.

There would be only one reason to shore up the documentation for the build process of a 30-year-old operating system. If you were HP, you'd be ensuring that MPE/iX could leave your building. Not that anybody is promising when that will happen — but HP has said that it will license selected parts of MPE/iX to any third parties once HP support ends.

As for the rest of the 2006 agenda of OpenMPE, it appears to be up in the air. The group has wrested a lot of documentation, enhancement and understanding from HP about the 3000. That's the sort of work that a good user group used to do. We hear that OpenMPE will be forming up as a Special Interest Group of Encompass, the user group that wants your involvement. Encompass recently extended its membership discounts for former Interex members.

Since these two groups could benefit from one another, it might be a good idea to give OpenMPE members a discount to join Encompass. What better way to attract HP 3000 expertise?

Conceal or encrypt: MPE can comply, with help

It seems no focus in IT is stronger these days than compliance. With the onslaught of HIPAA, SOX and other regulatory mandates, a manager of a 3000 has plenty of required work being dumped on the to-do list. Security is a big part of this, especially in the 3000 operations that process credit card transactions.

(Don't laugh. Every 3000 running Web commerce data is now in this category. Think Ecometry customers, hundreds of them.)

The recent Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards suggest encryption as a way to comply. (You can also truncate credit card numbers.) The 3000 doesn't do encryption as well as it manages database transactions efficiently. But there's a open source solution that can help.

Strong cryptography, such as Triple-DES 128-bit or AES 256-bit, is among the Visa solutions. The Internet Concealment Engine from Matthew Kwan can be used on MPE/iX. One 3000 expert we know recently reported that "It’s free, no strings, and is easily adaptable to MPE/iX,  *nix, and [Windows] NT. (I had it working on all three platforms in one evening). I don’t know how it compares to 2006 encryption schemes, but it beat DES by a longshot in ‘97 or so."

The downside of using the 3000 for encryption is the server's hobbled status. Encryption draws a lot of horsepower, one of the places you're likely to miss those extra processing cycles that HP takes out of the PA-8700 chip when you use most MPE/iX systems. In a security-crazed world, this seems like a good case for pulling the slowdown code out of MPE/iX N-Class and A-Class systems.

You can always shuffle the 3000 data through a Unix server for encyption, as a leading retailer does in stores throughout the West. Have a look at the Quest Software NFS solution that makes the 3000 a NFS client to aid in this task.

You'll also need to reach for a more secure backup system than STORE; those backups are in clear text. Orbit Software's Backup+/iX and NetBackup 3.4 from Veritas are potential secure backup candidates for MPE/iX. Both use DES 56-bit encryption. Banks need the 256-bit standard, though. There are banks using the 3000 these days, but they're moving away. We'll have a report on that next week from a 3000 app vendor who's making a careful, thorough transition.

The word is out on conversion's value

Converting an HP 3000 to an HP 9000 holds little value for the migrating customer. That's the consensus of a group of users who responded over the 3000 newsgroup to a query about the value in making an MPE/iX system capable of booting up HP-UX. HP simply re-programs a personality chip in your 3000 to make the conversion. It's much harder to make the numbers add up to significant value in the process.

Even the biggest of HP 3000s, the N-Class servers, are plodding, aging models in the HP 9000/HP-UX world. HP has given in and stopped advising customers to repurpose their 3000 hardware; instead, the vendor will apply a trade-in value for your HP 3000 to a purchase of an HP-UX system. How far off the pace are the 3000-grade systems when turned into HP-UX servers. Chuck Ciesinski, an HP-UX System Architect at ACS Educational Solutions and an OpenMPE board member, pointed out that even some Superdomes are considered obsolete by HP: 

On the hp.com servers page, take a look at the ‘Discontinued Servers’ link.  HP 3000s and HP 9000s are broken down by various classes.  All the A’s, L’s, K’s, and N’s are already discontinued.  In fact several of the HP ‘Superdomes’ are already on the discontinued list.

Ciesinski went on to add that one application divided over two Unix servers (for active/passive failover) is more the norm than what HP 3000 customers know: a single server hosting lots of apps.

Duane Percox of K-12 app vendor QSS, making a transition to HP-X and Linux, said that "The equivalent HP-UX systems are probably not currently supported or will soon be in that category." Percox added

HP is giving you credit for your MPE system toward the purchase of an HP system on a part-equivalence basis. This is to get around the ‘not supported issue.’ Also you get steep discounts on software. However, you have to consider the value of your MPE system vs the cost to acquire a new HP-UX system. Best to run the numbers and then decide.

It's hard to get a firm figure on what a 9x9 or even an N-Class HP 3000 is worth these days. HP has its numbers, a deal that ties a customer into HP hardware to replace the system. A transaction with a third-party reseller will at least net your company cash to use in a migration project, wherever the need is greatest. (We note that Pivital and Genisys support this newsletter and blog, so you should check with them first.)

When a customer posted a note to the 3000 newsgroup saying that his company probably wouldn't take HP up on its "conversion" offer, OpenMPE board member Donna Garverick replied, "I sure hope you don’t. It might be known as a career-threatening decision."

Garverick, who manages systems for Long's Drug — a 3000 customer which has taken many of its MPE operations onto Unix systems, explained how different a Unix customer thinks of their investment:

Way back when... when A- and N-Class systems were new-ish and (some) folks had the blissful idea that moving from MPE to HP-UX was a piece o’cake, HP’s offer almost sorta kinda made sense. But....

- In Unix-land, those boxes are (more-or-less) obsolete.
- That big honkin’ MPE N-class?  It’s a low-end, wheezy, sputtering unix system.
- There’s a radically different mind-set in many Unix shops regarding servers.  They’re commodity items.  You get ‘em...you burn through their horsepower... and you replace them a few years down the road for something even bigger yet.  Very different from MPE shops, where we tend to regard our servers as investments.  We’ll take 7-10 years to write the asset off.
- Don’t even think of “server consolidation.”  Single server/single app is very much the reality in Unix-land.

To maximize the value of a 3000 that's being moved out, a sale in the open market looks like the best value — especially if that 3000 is of the latest (A/N) generation.

Caring for orphans of the 3000

While this headline might prompt thoughts of abandoned customers and applications in the 3000 community, there's a more commonplace orphan problem to resolve on many 3000s. Users close their terminal emulators before they log off their 3000s. Go ahead, admit it — you've even done it yourself. It leaves orphaned sessions behind. So how can you detect these orphans and terminate them?

One suggestion, from telnet and HP 3000 advocate Wirt Atmar, is simply to avoid the orphan-ization in the first place with telnet connections, instead of NS/VT. "The problem is associated with the slightly higher complexity of NS/VT and the dissynchronization of state information," Atmar said in a post to the 3000-L newsgroup. "No matter how the user quits their session, a telnet connection cleanly breaks the connection and the session disappears. This behavior is consistent across all versions of MPE and all patches."

If your choice of connection can't be telnet for some reason, HP has supplied a free script to address the task of aborting jobs.

Donna Garverick of the OpenMPE advocacy group advised using the abortj script on HP's Jazz Web server:

http://jazz.external.hp.com/src/scripts/index.html#ABORTJ

"Pains are taken within this script to try to get rid of a session in many ways before resorting to an abortjob," she noted.

There's another possible cause for orphaned sessions: network port configuations with firewalls and Virtual Private Networks. John Bardessono added

I found that the firewall/VPN (network port) was configured for 100mbit full duplex. Sessions would disconnect, but still appear to be active with showjob.  I had the network port reconfigured to 10mbit, half duplex and the problem went away.

Reorg module opens new windows on maintenance

Some of the largest databases in the HP 3000 community now have a new path to dramatic performance improvements. This year’s add-on module for Bradmark’s DBGeneral software enables partial dataset reorganizations — a way for companies who “race to daylight” with IMAGE/SQL maintenance to break their race into multiple heats.

Bradmark’s founder Brad Tashenberg came up with the fundamental technology concept, according to the MPE and HP 3000 R&D leader Jerry Fochtman. “About six to eight months ago we came upon the concept to move forward with this enhancement,” he said. Enhancements like Partial Reorg are part of Bradmark's 3000 plan, he added. “When HP made its announcement about leaving the market in 2001, we said we’d stay with the users as long as they needed us.”

There’s more to being a 3000 vendor than just staying in the market. Products that can improve performance need to continue to evolve, particularly in a community where hardware upgrade funding can be hard to justify.

Many HP 3000 vendors have remained in the community since 2001. Fewer continue to enhance products for their customers. DBGeneral’s new Partial Reorg, offered as an separate-cost module, reduces processing time by more than 90 percent according to Bradmark’s test results.

The software went into beta testing in November, then rolled into general release at the end of 2005. Customers who can’t reorganize their databases inside a single maintenance window — third shift hours, for example, or a weekend — can have DBGeneral work on segments of the database, one at a time, to fit inside the available maintenance window.

Figures from Bradmark’s tests show that a 60-million-entry database with 50,000 keys saw its reorg time drop from 130 hours to 4.5 hours. The DBGeneral software module clusters records together by key value while maintaining chronological sequence on all chains. Fochtman said that improvements to MPE/iX filespace structures and other OS enhancements made the new optimization possible.

When timing tells as much as the news

Timing can be everything, but sometimes it just gives us good perspective on what we hear. In our weekly podcast (6MB MP3 file) we take a hard look for about six minutes at the timing of HP's goodwill news about extending 3000 support. A customer might wonder about all those ifs in the offer, as well as why a headline about the extension still doesn't appear on the main HP 3000 page on HP's Web site. Have a listen and let us hear in a comment below if you already knew about the news that slid out in the shadow of the year-end holidays.

Mainstream press speaks: Money makes vendors listen

Money talks, and marketing walks. (If you've heard that phrase worded a little differently, well, sometimes we pull our punches in the interest of civility.) Money talks in the computer world when it comes to defining what's obsolete. The subject came up this week in Computerworld when the magazine took a glance in print at HP's choice to add two years of basic support to its MPE/3000 business. Its columnist Frank Hayes drew good conclusions, ones that are worth translating for the 3000 experience.

On page 52 of this week's Computerworld print edition, a column examined  what obsolesence means to vendors, IT and your users. (Not everything makes it into Computerworld's print; we take that as a sign that this is important.) We were glad to see HP's extension of 3000 support  offered up as a recent example of how obsolete can change its meaning. (Frankly, we're glad to see the HP decision mentioned at all in a wide-circulation periodical. That news surfaced just days before Christmas, a time when lots of IT managers are not even in the office. More on that in our podcast Monday.)

Hayes pointed out that it's not exactly news that vendors determine obsolesence on the basis of revenues. Plainly put, if a platform is not selling as expected, it's not performing the vendor's mission: generate sales revenues and profits for shareholders. No matter what else you hear about any vendor's mission, even the old HP Way had profits and sales as the Number 1 objective for HP. That's something to remember while you estimate how much useful life your 3000 has left. Utility is your Number 1 object, not how much profit the 3000 earns for HP.

Hayes said in his column:

Vendors call something obsolete when they can no longer make money selling it. IT shops say the same thing isn't obsolete until we can no longer make money using it -- or maybe just until it no longer fits into our corporate IT architectures.

And end users, the people at their desks? Many of them believe a familiar IT system isn't obsolete until the pain involved in getting it to do what's needed is a lot greater than the pain of migrating to something new.

Still profitable, still useful, still bearable. Whose definition of obsolete is right? All of them.

So our translation: HP decided it could still make money off the 3000, for at least another couple of years, by selling support that turns a handsome profit, expenditure-wise. One rumor we heard recently had numbers of $30 million per year in support contracts, at the present rate, with only $8 million in salaries and parts to deliver HP 3000 services.

Service is the last revenue stream HP will enjoy off the 3000, and as it turns out, the HP support extension will be a good thing for the customers. There's still serious repair to be done on the systems' database, IMAGE/SQL. The LargeFiles that were created four years ago in MPE/iX 7.5 have never worked correctly, without the potential for corruption. Now there's two more years to get that fixed, although some are now asking if HP should bother. Customers just aren't using LargeFiles, perhaps because the feature didn't work.

HP makes profit off the 3000, so its service arm extends the profit side of the 3000 business. As for IT's obsolesence, many 3000 customers now face an erosion or elimination of corporate support for the server. That's not about the ecosystem, as HP told us in 2001. It's about the biggest animal in the forest: HP, and its exit from your community.

And those users? No news at all there, as Hayes said in his column. Many of the migrations underway just replicate the features and functionality of the MPE/iX applications. Many sites believe that's only a first step in the general improvement of their users' computing experience. These customers developed the will to spend their way through a migration. Improving the users' experience and the company's IT prowess will demand another shot of budgetary willpower.

Obsolesence is indeed in the eye of the beholder. Hayes advises that IT listen for the pain of the users to get a better handle on when something's obsolete. Listening is what HP tells the 3000 marketplace it's doing, too. Frankly, we would like to hear more talking from HP, especially about its plans for the 3000's source code and who will help the vendor meet its support and licensing commitments. The future for the 3000 customer is about who's staying in the ecosystem, unless you're leaving on the back of the biggest animal in your forest. Anything else you hear is just marketing.

iSeries alternative: Coulda been the 3000?

When HP chose to step out of the 3000 marketplace, changing its thousands of companies' futures, the vendor cited the uphill battle to sell a non-standard IT solution. Platforms not Unix or Windows simply were not going to provide a safe ecosystem, HP said. This week IBM announced news that begs to disagree.

Successor to the AS/400 marketplace, the iSeries, IBM says, is coming off a “milestone year” for the  platform. The vendor claims that the integrated solution most like the HP 3000 had its “highest level of growth in nearly 10 years.” Soon you'll see why, if you're a football fan: IBM will air an iSeries commercial during this coming weekend's Steelers-Broncos playoff game. Not long afterward, new POWER5 Plus i5 servers are expected to be announced. IBM says it's going to intensify its efforts to market the iSeries this year.

It's safe to say that like the 3000 community, the iSeries users wear their hearts on their sleeves, so to speak.

While that IBM solution got a fair bit of notice in our NewsWire special editions of 2002 and 2004 — and some persistent advertising from COBOL transformation shop PIR Group in those issues — we were puzzled about the lack of takeup for this 3000 alternative. (For the record, PIR Group has said it will be interested in supporting the HP 3000 conference of 2006. We also wrote up Flax Art, a former Ecometry site, as one of several 3000 customers gone the way of Big Blue.) Some of that resistance might have come from companies still smarting from long-ago wounds at the hands of IBM's mainframe-centralized culture. But a lot of the hesitation might be chalked up to the general slow pace of migration. Things are picking up this year. The iSeries could pick up some more 3000 business, among those companies dissatisfied with the Unix or Windows choice. After all, it's about the target applications, not the environment, right?   

The 3000 customer who's fond of the past — and that would be a lot of them, considering their migrate-or-homestead options over the next three to five years — looks at the iSeries success and perhaps scratches their head. Could it have been the 3000's fate to have a resurgence, if only HP had stayed a course?

For those interested in history, the difference between the two markets was mass. At its fattest the iSeries and AS/400 group could count close to a half-million installations. It hasn't fallen off much, by most estimates. The HP 3000 never grew beyond 70,000 systems, and now it probably counts 15 percent as many. Analyst house IDC reports that the installed base was at 23,000 a full year after HP said it was pulling its MPE plug, in 2002. Critical mass is something measured differently at different vendors. There's companies in the 3000 space who would kill for 20,000 customers. HP just wasn't one of them.

But as for the HP argument that the only thing with legs is a Windows or Unix solution, well, IBM is making some sweet profit off disagreeing. Its mainframe business also has strong loyalty. And while the iSeries servers will run IBM's Unix as well as Linux, that strong 2005 didn't come in on the back of companies using something other than i5OS, the successor the OS400 environment. Nothing Unix-like there.

The vendor is introducing its new OS functionality on Feb. 1 in a Webcast. If you're pining for a look at how a "non-standard" environment is making enhancements in 2006, you can sign up for the noon Eastern event at http://iseries.pentontech.com/t?ctl=1E616:1243BD

Turn back time to save applications

Some HP 3000s are reduced to a single application these days. But the one program that will never move off the platform, however vital it might be, could see its support disappear on a particular date — with no help available from the creators of the software.

A few utilities can help rescue such applications. These products were popular during the Y2K era, when systems needed their dates moved back and forth to test Year 2000 compatibility. Now that some HP 3000 programs are being orphaned, clock rollback utilities are getting a new mission.

A customer of SpeedEdit, the HP 3000 programmer's tool, had lost the ability to run the program at the start of 2006. Both Allegro Consultants and former NewsWire Inside COBOL columnist Shawn Gordon offer products to roll back the 3000's clock. These companies don't sanction using their software to dodge legitimate licensing limits. But if a software vendor has left your building, so to speak, then HourGlass/3000 or TimeWarp/3000 (both reviewed) are worth a try to get things running again.

3000 customer Paul Frohlich of DMX Music in the UK asked how to get his SpeedEdit running once again now that the calendar had rolled over to 2006:

When editing a file SpeedEdit creates a work file to hold the changes: it uses a structured name for the work file. According to the manual “ ... the first character of the [work] file name represents the year the [work] file was created, the letter A indicating 1980, B 1981 etc.” Therefore Z was 2005 and so there is no letter for 2006! SpeedEdit may be trying to use the next character in the ASCII table, which is probably non-numeric, resulting in an invalid MPE file name. A very neat way of making software expire. I suppose the authors didn’t think anyone would be using SpeedEdit in 2006!

Shawn Gordon replied with a suggestion to try his product, software that he's taking orders for direct these days:

While we don't sanction this for bypassing a programs legitimate timing out, it sounds like you've gotten in a bind with a product you paid for and the vendor is gone.  Our TimeWarp product which was originally created to do Y2K virtual dates would likely allow you to keep working; you can get some information from www.smga3000.com/timewarp_detail.html about the product.

In a matter of minutes up on the 3000 newsgroup, Stan Sieler of Allegro posted notice of an alternative solution from his company:

A date/time simulator may help, if you don’t mind the rest of  SpeedEdit getting the wrong time.  (E.g., run SpeedEdit with a date of, say, 1980... giving you another 25 years of bliss :)

HourGlass/3000 is still the most complete and most efficient date/time simulator tool.  You could use it with a rule like:    

@,@.@,@  speededt.pub.bbs  @   delta -20 years

(Means: any job/session name, any user, any account, any logon group, program is speededt.pub.bbs, from any ldev, gets the current date/time minus 20 years)

Sieler went on to add a more obvious option if a programming editor stops running on the 3000: Use Robelle's Qedit. He also outlined another workaround for a program that wants a date which its creators didn't expect to need to serve:

Write a CALENDAR intercept intrinsic (trivial in SPLash!, Pascal, C) that returns a modified year, put it in XL (e.g., SPDEDTXL), and modify (via LINKEDIT) SpeedEdit to load with that XL. If SpeedEdit is a CM program, change the above to: (trivial in SPL), put in an SL that SpeedEdit will use (SL.pub.BBS or whatever), and  mark SpeedEdit as LIB=P or LIB=G.