3000 NewsWire

Discount is departing for HP's Universe

HP will wrap up its $400 discount this week off its Software Universe, a relatively new conference about even newer HP-branded software. The Universe is held at the same time as the HP Technology Forum; the Universe meeting is just down Las Vegas Boulevard at the Venetian Hotel. Register by the end of this week (April 4) and the cost is $1,495. (An HP e-mail from this morning has the price at $100 lower than the cost on HP's Web site.)

HP called this mid-June week the Trifecta last year while promoting the conference, because it takes place in the same city and week as the HP StorageWorks conference and the Technology Forum. Even with all available discounts, attending all the conferences — and therefore maximizing your travel training time — will cost about $3,000. (Of course, being in two places at once might require more than one IT staff member, unless you're nimble or cherry-picking agendas.)

The Software Universe sessions and keynotes can be important if your company is taking a step into a large installation of HP's Unix, or an HP-based Windows solution. A very high percentage of what's showcased at the Universe as a solution is HP-branded, or from a close HP partner such as Oracle or SAP. Big-site stuff, some of this architecture serves. The standards tools can be a good bedrock for midsize companies, too.

HP created the Software Universe by combining its own HP Software meeting with an existing Mercury Interactive conference. HP purchased Mercury in 2006, when it paid $4.5 billion for the company. The most significant offering from what has become known as HP Mercury can be found on the HP Business Technology Optimization site. This is where the HP intelligence in the ITIL standards resides and grows.

HP is calling the discount which ends this week Winter Pricing, and the price tag is $100 below what you will find on the Software Universe Web site.

The conference runs concurrent with the Technology Forum down at the Mandalay Bay, wrapping up with another Thursday night party. As for the specific content, it's still being firmed up, with details expected by mid-April. Official sales of the sponsorship spaces are only ending today. But even at $1,495, HP says the price is a bargain.

Our informative Mainstage sessions, educational track sessions, and invaluable Solution Center are alone valued at more than $5,000. We estimate that an IT professional would need to attend more than a dozen webinars to be exposed to the amount of product knowledge attendees have access to during HP Software Universe. Add in the Partner Showcase, HP Roundtables, and Product Roadmap sessions, and the numerous networking opportunities, and the value is high for any person or team working to optimize the business value of IT.

HP adds that the Universe is recommended for "technical staff supporting their organizations' implementation of HP Software products," and that's really the long and short of it. If your enterprise is planning to use HP's software along with the vendor's environment, this can be a useful meeting to attend.

 

A new conference on the horizon

Three weeks from today, the HP Technology Forum becomes a little more expensive item on HP professionals' itinerary. The early bird registration discount ends on April 18, about two months before the mid-June meeting of HP and its customers, partners and employees.

Encompass and the ITUG user groups have been the driving forces for content in the conference, and the meeting's Expo floor generates revenues for the groups. The need to attend the Technology Forum will seem greatest to the HP 3000 site doing a migration, since almost all of the seminar content and confidential disclosure briefings address non-3000 solutions.

Some HP 3000 community partners will be exhibiting on the Expo floor. At the left you'll see (with an added click for detail) the overall agenda for the four days of meetings and networking, so you can start planning your travel. But at the moment there's no evidence of specific HP 3000 content scheduled for the June 16-19 conference. There's plenty to learn about HP's Unix, or Windows, or even OpenVMS — although that last environment isn't on the destination list for many 3000 users who are sticking with HP in their migrations.

Nevertheless, the June meeting presents the world's largest computer company in all of its enterprise glory, a meeting devoted to operating and improving computer user experience on the target platforms HP wants to sell its 3000 customers. The final word on the proposed consolidation of four HP user groups will also take stage in Las Vegas.

The discount for registering for the Forum by April 18 is "your choice of $100 gift certificate to HPShopping.com or HP's Logo Store." The HP shopping Web site offers desktops and notebooks among its most enterprise-oriented products (but nary a computer ships with anything other than Windows Vista, an OS gaining more problems with its first Service Pack release.) You can put your $100 toward a flatscreen TV for the executive boardroom, though. Joining Encompass earns you a discount off the $1,695 full conference pass, or off the $695 day pass, but the Encompass member discount doesn't have a deadline.

A new poll has popped up on the Encompass Web site about the top reasons which are luring people to the event:

Technical Education     65%
Networking Opportunities     52%
Hands-on Technical Labs     38%
Pre-conference Seminars     29%
The Technology Expo     29%
Advocacy Opportunities     15%
Keynotes by HP Executives     18%
Discounted Onsite Certification Testing     13%
Chapters & Special Interest Group Events     11%

Of all the attractions listed, the final one will reveal the new name for the consolidated user group.

Without much in the way of conference session specifics, we're left to learn that that Mark Hurd, HP Chairman and CEO; Ann Livermore, Executive VP TSG; and Randy Mott, Executive VP and CIO will be speakers. It's early in the registration process, so early that the space on the Expo floor is still being sold by Encompass user group management partner Smith Bucklin.

HP user groups crank up consolidation

Encompass and its allied user groups offered specifics on the consolidation of four groups, a move the groups have scheduled for April pending member approval. Encompass, the Tandem ITUG user group, HP Interex Europe and the Pacific Rim outpost of Encompass want to become a single entity.

As a single group, the entity that's being called Endeavor hopes to attract more notice and cooperation from Hewlett-Packard and offer a better package of benefits to its members. Encompass president Nina Buik hopes the consolidation will make Endeavor more attractive to younger members of the HP IT professional community.

But first comes the vote on the consolidation, scheduled for "soon" in a message to user group members. In order to inform its electorate, Encompass pointed to an "Agreement and Plan of Consolidation", a legal document that Encompass posted online for members to review prior to the upcoming vote. You don't have to be a current member of any of the user groups to look at the plan; just head to the new Endeavor site to review the document.

Only user group members will be asked to vote, however. But they'll have a clear view of what the user groups need them to approve.

The consolidated group's site also has recorded Webcast presentations and an FAQ file, but the message of this week highlighted several plans for the new group:

Board of Directors: The Board of Directors slate for the new organization will include current board members from each of the three organizations that were chosen to represent their respective members. These trusted individuals have demonstrated exemplary service and dedication to their communities and are considered qualified to serve as Directors of the new organization. The bylaws detail the Board positions and terms as well as the various committees and subgroups.

New Organization Name: There are name recommendations under consideration that are currently undergoing a trademark search process. This due diligence will have a bearing on the name that is eventually chosen. Therefore, the new organization's proposed name is not included within the Agreement and Plan of Consolidation, but will be finalized for the intended launch at the HP Technology Forum & Expo 2008 in June.

Membership Dues Structure: The membership structure and fees are detailed in the document for both basic individual membership and corporate membership. Basic individual membership will be US$50 and an additional fee for the Connection magazine subscription. Should the new organization be approved, current memberships with Encompass will be honored with the new organization.

The many views of your community

Adager's Alfredo Rego covered a broad swath of subjects at the recent GHRUG International Technology Conference. His keynote talk ranged from "parables" of Ford executives who had no user experience with the cars they designed and marketed, to the Bank of America founder — whose said his lending requirements began with "people whose character I trust."

Each story seemed to have some connection to the life of a 3000 user in the Transition Era, and one section of Rego's talk addressed the many ways to view HP's 3000 profile these days, as well as views of the community.

"It is something which can be viewed from many different angles," he said. "There is HP's high perspective. The lowly user perspective. The vendor perspective." Each segment went onto the chalkboard behind him in a room where students received instruction. At that moment, Rego could be viewed in a teacher's perspective.

"HP wants to send one message that won't confuse," he said. "There are also many perspectives of users, such as those who couldn't wait for HP to get out of the market in 2001, to provide a reason for them to move away from the 3000, using hired guns."

Rego drew a link back to his Bank of America parable, in which the founder knew his customer community from a "rubber meets the road" perspective. With the sub-prime debacle caused by outside management as a modern day allegory, Rego reminded the GHRUG  attendees about the security of using a close-up perspective.

"Whenever you get hired guns, managing things they have no clue about, all hell breaks loose," he said. Not that HP has nothing but hired guns managing its relations with this community, of course. "I have had the pleasure of working with very technical people at the lowest possible bits and bytes level HP since 1974," he said.

The pleasure seemed to fade further up HP's management line. "I was frightened when I spoke to HP's managers some time ago and asked them, 'Have you run an HP 3000 application?' I said oh boy, this is the beginning of the end. That is something to keep in mind, because it is pretty predictable."

Migration: Not just a 3000 project

HP 3000 users are not alone among migrators in the Hewlett-Packard world. The top two alternatives to the system, from HP's point of view, also bear migration concerns. Windows and HP-UX environment customers both faced migration messages this week.

Users of the more popular target among HP 3000 migration sites, Windows, are listening for what Microsoft will do about the expiration date for Windows XP. The seven-year-old environment is being dropped by Microsoft in favor of Vista, an operating system which has had just 20 percent adoption in one year's time. A remarkably low number, considering how many new PCs ship only with Vista.

Microsoft has told large computer makers such as HP to stop selling XP as of the end of June. This deadline, like the one HP stated for its HP 3000 support, has already been extended once, from January 1 of this year. A CNET news article supposes that Microsoft is not far away from extending the sales deadline for XP once again.

Then there's HP-UX, the proprietary Unix which HP's Alvinia Nishimoto described as a popular choice for the migrating customers which HP tracks. Just today the Encompass user group, in cooperation with HP, started surveying about why users are "either planning or actively migrating your environment to Integrity or another platform." So away from PA-RISC Unix or MPE, but on to something other than HP's Unix? Encompass wants to know more.

The invitation to take the survey is entitled "HP-UX Migration Plan Checkpoint Survey," with nary a mention of HP 3000 or MPE/iX. This is about moving on from HP's Unix.

As you continue in planning and migrating your environment, we would like to check in with a quick 5-minute survey. As always we value your inputs which help us focus and prioritize on areas of importance to our customers.

HP 3000 customers might want to overlook the "As always" part of the last sentence, since at the moment the vendor isn't focusing on input from the OpenMPE advocacy group. But that's another issue. The HP-UX Migration Plan survey wants to know how many of the following systems will be the target of a migration away from HP 9000 HP-UX (HP9000) servers:

• HP-UX on HP Integrity
• Linux on HP Integrity
• Windows on HP Integrity   
• OpenVMS on HP Integrity
• Linux on HP ProLiant   
• Windows on HP ProLiant   
• UNIX on HP ProLiant   
• UNIX on non-HP servers   
• Linux on non-HP servers   
• Windows non-HP servers

At least the questions are ranked in order of HP's most proprietary solutions, and OpenVMS is included. The survey asks if availability of current applications meet a customer's needs in migration to Integrity. The number of Integrity apps, based on the Itanium architecture, were an issue while HP was ramping up its Integrity (Itanium-based offerings).

HP/Encompass asks "What are your primary criteria for selecting a migration target platform:

• Relationship with vendor
• Quality/reliability
• Highest performance
• Best price/performance   
• Lowest cost/price   
• Availability of applications   
• Compatibility with current systems   
• Power consumption/footprint

Finally, the user group serving HP's enterprise customers wants to know which of these considerations will drive the choice of a target platform

• Application or data center consolidation
• Implement a Service Oriented Architecture
• Scale-Out deployment
• Implementing server virtualization
• Deploying blade servers
• Migration to HP-UX v3

You can take the survey yourself if you're moving off HP-UX on PA-RISC. Everybody who participates gets a chance in a drawing for "HP logo Travel Gear." We got a swell backpack with the HP logo during our visit to last year's Technology Forum, without even travelling away from HP-UX.

Talk to another machine to assure a future

We'll file this one under both Homesteading and Migration, because this advice from the GHRUG International Technology Conference can serve both those staying and those leaving the 3000 community. Make sure your HP 3000 talks to another server well — today. It can mean the difference between using newer technologies down the line for the 3000 as you transfer data, either for backup or transitions to new systems.

For the homesteader, long term use of the 3000 might be blocked by a change in something like Cisco networking protocols. This is a de-facto kind of standards shift, according to ScreenJet's Alan Yeo. And it's just the kind of change that HP, or any third party support provider, will find it impossible to difficult to address (depending on whether it's HP or the third party you use.)

"When people talk about long-term homesteading, and what's going to happen to the 3000, this is the one point," Yeo said. "If you've got a 3000 and it's isolated from the outside world, you've probably got a lot less problems. But if you're using a 3000 in an environment that's pretty related to other machines or other sites — well, if HP are no longer doing patches, next year when Cisco might change what they're doing with their FTP process, or somebody else changes something and it becomes a de-facto standard, the odds are you won't get the link between the 3000 and another device working."

One solution lies in another platform, according to Marxmeier's AG's Michael Marxmeier, who was also at the GHRUG talk.

"You should plan ahead to be able to communicate with servers in the rest of the world," said Marxmeier, especially for any company with governmental computing partnerships or requirements.

Yeo said his company was using an intermediate server as a workaround while setting up an FTP exchange of HP 3000 backup files with a Network Attached Storage device. An intermediate server can cause a tremendous increase in network traffic from a 3000 to another device, he added, so solving the direct link challenge is the most efficient solution.

And the migration connection on this advice? It's sensible to plan for a target migration server to act as the intermediary between an HP 3000 and another device. Makers of network devices such as routers and switches will continue to be able to communicate with Unix servers, for example, or even Windows XP systems.

More storage tips from Houston

ScreenJet's Alan Yeo had advice for 3000 storage solutions at this month's GHRUG International Technology Conference, counsel for those with limited budgets or no budget at all. Disk drive prices have fallen so far that a half-terabyte $600 RAID-class drive can be had for HP 3000 use, he said.

Even an HP-branded drive for the HP 3000 costs under $500 by now, although it will offer less than a tenth of that capacity. A 36GB HP drive is priced at about $400 on the community's market, "so long as you don't want it tomorrow. Getting enough disk space to do a STORE to Disk should not be a problem," he said.

Backup techniques can have an impact on costs to upgrade storage options, too. "You can always look at splitting your backup up, if you don't have enough disk space. Instead of doing @.@.@ you split it into chunks, if you don't even want to spend $400 for more disk."

3000 managers can get around the problem of backing up files of 4GB or more with some backup products "which let you specify extent size you want to use, so they won't go up to 4GB," Yeo said. "The other approach we've adopted with HP STORE is to actually split up the backup, so the backup runs in three or four steps, each one of them not exceeding the 4GB limit."

Breaking a backup into chunks also means "it's an awful lot quicker to get something back," Yeo added.

Making NAS work with the 3000

Network Attached Storage (NAS) is a powerful enterprise resource, full of value now that disk prices have plummeted. At the GHRUG International Technology Conference, Alan Yeo of ScreenJet shared his secrets for making NAS an HP 3000 tool.

"Like most HP 3000 shops we were looking for a cheap way to [store many gigabytes of data] — and there was no way we could afford a DLT," he said. Digital Linear Tape boasts massive capacities, but most storage these days is going straight to another disk.

Yeo said that fundamentally, the method to include NAS as an option is to create STORE to Disk files, "and then FTP those STORE files up to the NAS device. A simple half-terabyte (500 GB) RAID-1 NAS device is the equivalent of 40 12-GB DDS tape drives."

It's a little unsettling to learn how much HP 3000 backups still go onto DDS tapes. Even the DLT tapes are a pain to handle, Yeo added.

You need enough free disk space on your HP 3000 to do the STORE to Disk files, Yeo explained. "If you haven't got 50 percent free disk space and you're doing a complete backup in one hit, you're going to have a problem," he said.

STORE to Disk speeds are not significantly slower than STORE to tapes. One way to speed up the process is to have a few separate volume sets for these STOREs, sets that are two or more high-speed spindles. HP's got disks today which spin up to 15,000 RPM. Third party disks work with HP 3000s, too, in case HP hasn't got a certified product for your MPE/iX server.

FTP bandwidth can be a bottleneck for some older HP 3000s, sometimes as slow as 10 megabits per second. "You may have a protracted FTP process to your NAS device," Yeo said.

Using NAS is not a substitute for having a good SLT tape for your system in case of disaster. Yeo added that doing an @.@.SYS backup onto the same SLT tape, "so you'll have everything you need when you bring the box back up to get the networking started."

Devices available for HP 3000 NAS use? The Buffalo Terastation Pro worked in one of Yeo's projects for a client, and the device starts at $650 and goes up for 1-4 TB. Another choice is the Infrant ReadyNAS at the same price point. Shop online.

It may seem crazy to be ordering HP 3000 storage devices from Amazon.com. But so much has changed for the HP 3000 customer, and some of the change opens up new opportunities to save money and make your server even more efficient.

What you own is not what you purchased

At last week's GHRUG International Technology Conference, HP reminded the community that nobody owns MPE/iX but HP. Owns it forever, even if you bought a server because you believed MPE/iX was bundled, added value of a great operating system and database. No, your money was spent on a license, not software.

At GHRUG, HP's e3000 business manager Jennie Hou confirmed the clear intention that HP will cede nothing but "rights" to the community after HP exits the 3000 business."The publisher or copyright owner still owns the software," Hou said when license requirements beyond 2010 were discussed. "You didn't purchase MPE/iX. You purchased a right to use it."

See the presentation slide below (by clicking to get a larger view) for the exact HP wording.

It looks like HP's statement about licensing, announced in the dark holiday week of December 2005, must be re-evaluated. Not that it was untrue, but consider what it amounts to. It's a mystery how HP can give any significant use of MPE/iX to third parties in the years after the vendor won't offer services for the 3000 community. A third party owns nothing under these rules, but should build a business model and employ experts on this basis? Risky business, that.

A third party will just have to hope to rely on access to MPE/iX source. And nothing else but hope. In any contract no better than a typical customer's, a support firm would own nothing but that Right To Use what HP owns. Support for the third party support supplier for MPE/iX from HP? Shut down, by 2010. Support suppliers could consider that deal a sketchy foundation to build a business upon.

The 3000 community can only hope that's not HP's intention for support providers: To make any alternative support for the 3000 community remain sketchy. HP retains its ownership, but the intention of this 2005 announcement was to "help partners" do support business. Here's that HP 2005 statement, as a reminder of Hewlett-Packard's intentions.

When HP no longer offers services that address the basic support needs of remaining e3000 customers, HP intends to offer to license HP e3000 MPE/iX source code to one or more third parties — if partner interest exists at that time — to help partners meet the basic support needs of the remaining e3000 customers and partners.

If this sounds dour, the update was at least a disappointment for any community member bringing expectations to the GHRUG meeting. HP has refused, according to community sources familiar with the matter, to budget any monies for the source code project until at least November, 2010. That's right: the word we heard is that the work that only HP can do to put MPE/iX into the community didn't make it onto the 2008 budget, and won't make it into 2009's spending, either.

We would love to be corrected on this last point by HP, or at least learn of a change of its strategy. Because if the report is right, it means that Hewlett-Packard is not doing the right thing for any companies which won't be migrated by the end of October, 2010. Hundreds to thousands of companies, according to our reports from HP's partners. Despite HP's statement at the conference that migration activity is "now on the down-slope," we hear very different reports from customers both large and small. Something is on the down-slope in HP's 3000 view, to be sure, but it's not the work of moving off the HP 3000.

If HP gets to work late in 2010 on source code transfer, that's late enough to consider the project a non-starter — as well as a surreptitious turnabout from HP's intention in 2005 to enable your community to continue with MPE/iX servers.

To be clear, we heard that HP plans to shut down all of its public 3000 operations just 60 days into the HP 2010 budget. We're at a loss to figure who inside HP could do enough preparation for MPE/iX transfer in what will be less than eight weeks' time. By November of 2009, the HP 3000 lab will already have been closed for 10 months. Workarounds and site-specific patches are all that will be done.

Business sometimes includes no fairness. But conduct with a community should be built on justice. HP has long maintained that your money paid for support has no business funding any work inside HP's development labs. Forget if that is fair. Think about whether it seems a just act to receive revenues this year, with no regard for how a longtime partner — the customer — will fare after a supplier closes the doors.

 

Some people buy insurance for peace of mind, with no intention of using it. HP's support customers get access to untested enhancements and fixes for their money. By the end of this year, third party support gets better than anything HP offers to the customer at large.

Any community members who need HP to finish its end-game work, by beginning to reveal specifics now, should consider this kind of justice about maintenance. Especially when they consider the question of maintaining a relationship with a vendor who has one last proprietary environment — HP-UX and HP Integrity servers — which it means to sell you as a 3000 replacement.

Remember, you're not purchasing HP-UX, just a right to use it. And every vendor-specific product has an end-game. Watch what HP does right now with the HP 3000 and MPE/iX in the vendor's end-game.

What HP has to say for itself

In a little more than 40 minutes last week, HP's talked about the 3000 division's future for the remaining work on the system. We reported the math for HP e3000 business manager Jennie Hou at her talk. Less than 41 weeks remain before HP's 3000 development of any kind will end. That's scant time to finish so many tasks, like release of 3000 enhancements long-finished but untested, or HP preparation for turning over the care of MPE/iX to the community.

HP is going to release a PowerPatch 5 to its support customers during 2008. The company will also "provide clear guidelines for performing hardware upgrades." These were the only plans HP announced for the rest of this year. There will be no further PowerPatches for 6.5 and 7.0 MPE/iX releases. (The individual 6.5/7.0 patches can be downloaded by the entire community.) That's all HP plans to do.

Click on the slide at the right to see the sparse plans for the remainer of 2008.

Those unreleased beta-test patches are in limbo, unless HP has confidential plans it didn't share at GHRUG. A pledge to deploy "a very aggressive plan to put together a program for beta test patches" was entirely without details. HP still puts the plan in the hands of customers, a community loath to change much on frozen systems.

Customers and partners in the audience asked if HP would reduce its beta-test requirements to get dozens of fixes and enhancements into the community. Beta-test is a status restricted to HP support customers. No, HP did not report it would do this for the six dozen software projects that it has built and tested since 2004.

Instead, the audience got a repeat performance. Hou, speaking on behalf of HP management, repeated the "virtual" HP 3000 division was "investigating" one need or another. In HP's process of delivering anything to the community, "investigation" is only the first step of a process that includes "funding" and then "planning" and finally "development." Oh, and the testing, if needed. Many HP projects have never gone beyond investigation.

For a list of what's still in limbo, across three releases of MPE/iX, have a look at HP's roundup on what needs to be tested and released in 41 weeks' time.