3000 NewsWire

Storage on the biggest 3000s

Somewhere in Minnesota, a farm of more than 30 HP 3000s tracks airline ticket transactions. The farm, one of the biggest collections of 3000 horsepower, uses plenty of storage. How much is hard to say, since the operation is under wraps and not open to press coverage.

But N-Class HP e3000s need storage that outstrips the requirements of most other HP 3000 models. A customer recently asked about options for data storage on these big systems.

We are looking at using a N-Class system and I’m trying to find out what storage options are available. What kind of disc options are being used out there? I understand that HP does not support EMC storage on the N-Class, but is anyone using it?

Craig Lalley, whose EchoTech consulting firm specializes in putting newer and better storage into 3000 shops, was at the ready with answers.

Lalley, who consults along with Jeff Kubler from their US Northwest HQ, said

The N-Class has native fibre, and while the EMC storage devices are not supported, I guarantee they work just fine.  (I do think the performance of HP's XP1024 arrays are much better).

The N-Class can connect to a VA7410. This storage device supports HAFO (High Availability Fail Over) and is rated at 35,000 I/Os per second.  It has 2GB of cache.  It is a Virtual Array, and is about the size of a MOD20, about 10U. (That's a guess).

The other options are

• The XP512, which does about 300,000 I/Os per second; it is much older and about the size of one large refrigerator.
• The XP1024 or XP128 are rated at 450,000 I/Os per second and are a great option today. 
• The XP128 has less expansion capabilities that the XP1024, but the same core, and can go to 64GB of cache.

As for pricing, it depends on how much space you need.

The payoff between a VA7410 or an XP128 is about three VA7410s  — which means it is less expensive to purchase one XP128 than three VA7410’s.

Advocate: A tired term?

Now that the Connect user group's Web site is up and running, its content and comments are drawing notice here in my office. The group's president Nina Buik, who said in an interview with us at the HP Technology Forum that "advocacy" is being replaced by "community voice," elaborated on the strategy change in her blog at the Connect Web site. She said that many Connect members, including those who manage the HP 3000 replacement platform HP-UX, "have noticed there is no 'tab' marked 'advocacy' on the Connect Web site."

The term voice is important because it’s not Community Rant, Community Scream, or Community Gripe. The culture of Connect is not to be an adversarial watchdog of HP, but rather a positive forum where we can affect positive change to make the products and services we buy from HP even better. It is diplomacy versus combat, it is productive versus destructive.

Advocacy, Buik says, is a tired term "that in most minds reflects the outcome of some extensive survey." That has been true in the Interex user group, the community founded by HP 3000 customer/volunteers. But there were times when the extensive survey was only enough industry pioneers being able to see a problem that Hewlett-Packard could not. And complain about it in public to help HP see the clarity of the problem.

In the fullness of time, however, those Interex Management Roundtables — which gave HP VPs the opportunity to answer questions from a crowd of users in a ballroom — were replaced by that "extensive survey" kind of advocacy. The reviews on that kind of advocacy were pretty bad from the customers, vendors and industry pioneers. The survey was a vast document, with answers checked off on a 1-10 scale. It resulted in HP defending, answering and even admitting where it had gone wrong. The advocacy by that time had all of the dynamic of an infomercial.

But the old style of advocacy was alive at the recent Tech Forum in the HP-UX System Management Panel. Even though Connect needs to call the interchange "community voice," the Islander E room had more than a few customers venting about an unsatisfactory level of HP service and product for the Unix platform. We disagree with Buik and Connect on that point: For adults who can be civil, combat and conflict can result in resolutions.

OpenMPE is an advocacy group, or has been up to now, which goes to bat only about issues that impact the HP 3000 user. There's nothing wrong with either model — and from the looks of what Encompass/Connect has been able to do in getting close to HP management, it seems Hewlett-Packard sees more value in voice than advocacy. But OpenMPE has made a lot of difference in HP's end-game processes and plans for the 3000. But Connect's Buik says that "community voice"

...promises to be much more than the interpreter of an annual survey but a real-time voice to HP and HP’s partners. After meeting with several HP execs in Las Vegas [in June] at the HP Technology Forum & Expo, the goal for Connect is to provide an effective and efficient conduit for response and proposed actions by HP. This is happening, this is real, and this is your new Community Voice.

If anyone has become weary of "advocacy," it looks to be the community members and HP executives who want a positive perspective on the nature of selling computer products and services. It will up to the Connect members to decide if the user group's culture can accomplish what that rants and venting have not. Buik adds

At the first face-to-face Connect board meeting in Las Vegas, I delivered a presentation on Connect culture based on previous feedback and input from the Connect board. There was unanimous sentiment regarding focusing on the positive, objective leadership, open-mindedness and embracing (not just respecting) diversity in everything that we do.

Keep poison out of your Internet names

It started out as a bizarre error: I couldn't get Google to appear in my browsers this morning. First there were strange messages about "too long SSL strings" broadcast to the server, and finally the mess devolved into every attempt to hit Google landing me at Hostmonster.com.

This kind of attack could happen to the HP server community without some vendor engineering. The assault is called DNS poisoning, a way to hijack the DNS name resolution services of your system or your Internet Service Provider. Hostmonster.com, after all, couldn't tell me much about the state of DNS poisoning. It's amazing how much we rely on the Google site for searches now.

Even the 3000 NewsWire's search features, for our archive Web site and current news blog, use a Google engine. Not an issue for our readers, most of whom use Windows, which has a patch available. Fixing this became a priority mission for me and my servers. It should be for you too, and HP has concocted a patch to help protect you.

The patch is fresh — just about 10 days old, because nearly all of the major operating system makers worked together to create a barrier for this kind of exploit. Notably absent: Apple, which apparently has been too busy creating a twice-as-fast cell phone/PDA to participate in the patch alliance. Soon, we Mac users hope.

Enough of the drama. HP says that it's vital you install patch HSBUX02351, software which affects just about every version of HP-UX in enterprise installations today. That's 11.21, 11.23, and 11.31.

As for the MPE/iX counterparts to these repairs, HP hasn't released any statement we can find, let along any software. DNS represented a watershed for the 3000 when Mark Bixby created the BIND software which performs the addess-finding magic. Bixby is gone away from HP, but Jeff Bandle is a networking guru still working with 3000 community members this year.

We're going to keep up on the situation with Bandle and Bixby, hoping that the HP lab team — still working until the end of the year — can keep Google from turning into a mess of error messages, or some other popular and vital Web site from being routed into the hands of unwitting pirate slaves.

Connect opens up myCommunity

HP user group Connect opened up its portal to the HP enterprise computer community late last week with an introduction of myCommunity, a feature that Connect calls a place that

... mirrors the social networking site launched for HP Technology Forum & Expo 2008, and allows you to find other members with the same interests as you, in the same field as you, and in the same region as you when you use the Community Map.

Connect members receive full access to myCommunity with a username and password which is assigned when they join Connect (Encompass) or contact the organization. The fee for individuals is $50 for a membership which lasts through December 2009. There's even a complimentary membership (for a limited time) with allows you access to myCommunity.

I fleshed out my own profile on the site (you will need the smallest picture of yourself you ever took, at 120x120 pixels) to give my profile some personality, plus three pages of demographics to let the myCommunity software from Leverage Software find matches to my profile. I threw my demographic net pretty wide, but so far haven't come up with a lot of close matches (as you can see above, I'm in the dead center of the circle.) But the site and the community is brand-new. So far, we've got five members of the "Other/HP e3000" group, and two in the SIG Migrate group.

So you could join us in either group and start a discussion, if you're a Connect member.

Connect closed the social networking site for the HP Technology Forum & Expo 2008 on June 29, about 10 days after this year's HP Technology Forum & Expo, then worked with Leverage Software to refresh and reintroduce it as the myCommunity feature on the Connect Web site.

Connect explains the features of its social network:

• Update your profile so that other members like you can find you by selecting “Updating My Profile”
• Posting to discussion forums by selecting “Groups”
• Read and post to other individuals’ blogs by selecting “Community Blogs”
• Start meeting other members like you by selecting the “Community Map”

If you do not have a current Connect membership, we encourage you to follow these simple instructions to renew your membership and start getting connected using the new social networking feature:

1.    Visit the Join Connect page and renew or sign up for your Connect membership.
2.    Once you have renewed or signed up for membership, you may then begin enjoying the social networking member benefits.

Questions we all want answered

Back in March the Greater Houston RUG hosted the GHRUG International Technology Conference. This was a meeting full of 3000 customers, many of whom were looking for migration justifications, advice, as well as assurances that homesteading had its merits, too.

Just at the finale of the conference, Alan Yeo of ScreenJet and I dreamed up some questions we planned to handle on a roundtable to conclude the conference. Then an HP employee took an extra 40 minutes to explain virtualization on the HP-UX, and these questions went into limbo.

Well, not exactly into limbo, but into my notebook, since they are good questions many 3000 sites either want answered, or can answer from experience. Take this test and see if you can write a couple of sentences for each.

1. What are the biggest mistakes when people are migrating?
2. What do you perceive as the greatest risks in homesteading?

There are eight more, each providing a proving point for a migration choices and pace of your movement, if any, away from the MPE/iX environment.

The other eight, including a really wide-ranging one at the end:

3. What are the main technical problems that people find during migration?
4. What are the advantages and disadvantages of emulating the MPE environment?
5. What OS choices are you making and why, and what seem to be the pros and cons?
6. What third party tools represent the biggest problems to duplicate when migrating?
7. What preparation would you do now, even if you don't intend to be migrating for several years?
8. Isn't migration from the HP 3000 inevitable?
9. How can Linux help me if I'm homesteading or when I migrate?

The doozy:

10. What are you doing now, honestly?

I'd love to see comments and replies to this entry. I plan to push it in print, over the 3000 newsgroup, and even up on the social networks. Chime in, even if it's just one of the 10. You should ensure that your migration advisor or supplier can answer these for you, too.

Eloquence: The path of least resistance

This one is for migration sites only, but the story involves an HP 3000 keystone: IMAGE. Your system has come bundled with IMAGE/3000, then TurboIMAGE, then TurboIMAGE XL and iX, since 1976. HP won an award for the database about the time the product was first bundled with every 3000, ranking Number One in a Datamation study.

Oracle was also in the running that year, along with IBM's DB2. SQL Server didn't exist, and neither did Eloquence — although that last database was not very far away from going to work for enterprises like yours.

Out on the 3000 newsgroup, the users and vendors of the community debated the merits of an SQL database versus IMAGE. Migration sites will require something to replace IMAGE. Nothing is a closer match or a better value than Eloquence, although the product did have a few detractors in the online discussion.

Craig Lalley runs an HP 3000/HP 9000 consulting business along with Jeff Kubler (we interviewed Kubler in our last printed issue). Kubler said, based on his field experience with users

Part of the path is convincing management, and that means getting cost approval. While large companies can absorb the cost of Oracle, most small to medium business would choke at the cost. Eloquence is much more cost effective and provides 80 percent of the capabilities of Oracle.

Small to medium is you, reader, for the most part. More HP 3000 sites hover below the $100 million run rate than those running above it. If your IT enterprise is part of a much larger mothership already using Oracle, migrating to it is an easy decision. SQL Server is only a little easier, because of a cost still in the Oracle strata — but "it's Windows, man."

Something like damning with faint praise, unless you can add, "and I don't mean the bad Windows, Vista."

Charles Finley, who's been working alongside IBM's outpost Sector 7 to migrate large enterprises to IBM systems, said that by breaking out the cost of TurboIMAGE (a clever trick, if you can manage it), the migration databases are not that much less of a value.

If one compares the cost of the Oracle Standard Edition or MS SQL Server or DB2 for something like the HP 3000 with a TurboIMAGE license when it was sold, you will see that the cost of that plus an Intel server is not all that different. I played with Oracle’s numbers the other day and was pleasantly surprised to find this out.

When Michael Anderson pointed out that "migrate to Oracle requires more money upfront. So my idea of 'Path of least resistance' is: COST!"

Denys Beauchemin has also been helping users migrate, and added that using a
"true relational database" like Oracle gives a foundation in software that is, well, we'll let him say it:

Oracle is HUGE, (yes it can be in cost also.)  But as foundational software, it is amazing.  The companies that I have helped migrate to Oracle have been very pleased to get all these capabilities heretofore unavailable to them. Going from IMAGE to Oracle is a veritable quantum leap and one that is very liberating.

As for open source relational database migrations, Duane Percox of QSS said that his application for K-12 school systems used to run on TurboIMAGE. That database has seen its day, he says.

For its day TurboIMAGE was a great tool. That day has passed. Just like I don’t use RMS (DEC) anymore, there will come a day I don’t use TurboIMAGE. No sadness, just fond memories for the fun we had with TurboIMAGE in running circles around DEC solutions that used bloated DB solutions.

We have done a bunch of PostgreSQL and find it to be a wonderful database, but our customers are choosing SQL Server at a rate of about 80/20 over PostgreSQL, with Oracle being almost non-existent. But that [latter choice] is more due to our customer base than the technology itself.

As a last word we'll quote Ray Shahan, IT manager at Republic Title, who also swears by the power of an RDBMS. The power, Shahan says after taking courses in Oracle and SQL Server, lies in the third party tools for those more costly DBs.

The current RDBMS technologies are  to IMAGE what IMAGE was to flat files - just blows it away.  This is not really due to anything about the DB’s themselves, rather, the really cool tools for these DB’s.  SQL alone can make IMAGE more useful (much more useful), but using triggers and stored procs as well as vendor specific access languages (for instance, PLSQL), make data access quick and fun!

Preparing for prairie dog pop-ups

Hewlett-Packard canceled its Certified Professional status for HP 3000s earlier this summer. At the most recent HP Technology Forum, user group president Nina Buik of Connect said that HP could only find 21 IT pros who held CP certificates for MPE/iX. No vendor, she reported, would keep a certification program open for so few pros.

There's more to the story, another side that HP 3000 education expert Paul Edwards laid out. HP canceled those 3000 certs for the second time when it was shutting them down this June. Back in 2005, the vendor cut off certifications with little warning. Edwards' efforts and negotiations with Hewlett-Packard's Rich Gossman saved the certs back then.

Why should anyone in the 3000 community care about Certified Professional certification? Even if there were only 60 CP holders with HP 3000 system administrator or HP reseller certs, this is a significant number. Soon, HP 3000 owners will pop their heads out of their cubicles like prairie dogs from holes. They'll wonder where all the expertise has gone and how to find some. In about 22 weeks, HP's 3000 labs will abandon the prairie.

"The 3000 talent pool is shrinking," says Edwards, who retired from the OpenMPE advocacy group this spring after five years of service. He has been a teacher of HP 3000 owners, and said that he usually concluded his classes — taught for HP — by advising the 3000 pros to go take the certification test to get their cert.

I heard at the HP Tech Forum that the vendor couldn't keep a cert program open for just a couple dozen certification holders. It's hard to see why not, considering that keeping those certifications valid would not cost HP anything. The certifications were already issued. HP would be preparing no more tests, or retesting for a platform which HP has frozen.

All the cert program amounted to in HP's effort was maintaining a few dozen names in a database, a database so ill-managed during 2005 that HP couldn't even find it. It was located at last, Edwards arranged to have the certifications put into a special status: recognized, but not to change.

The only way anyone would get a new CP cert would be if Edwards and his partner in education Frank Smith could devise tests for Sylan Prometric Learning centers to administer. HP refused to do even this, even after the vendor had permitted Edwards and Smith to use the HP classroom materials for HP 3000s — materials which Edwards and Smith had written, and rewritten.

Now HP's CP program has been "realigned" for the second time in three years, and more than a dozen CP certs have been kicked out of the program. This kind of weeding out happens when a vendor is turning away from products, not when it's running short of money. HP's Services group was plenty profitable last year.

Finding help for managing HP 3000s, certified help that could pass an HP test on the platform, just got harder this summer. The 3000 owners who have been eyeing the horizon have a better chance of making their ownership sustainable. The prairie dogs, unaware of what HP has been bulldozing on the prairie, will find either another reason to migrate — which would please Hewlett-Packard — or a challenge that their vendor won't assist.

3000 patch fixes repair program

Several years ago, HP updated its 3000 customers to a diagnostic suite called CSTM. The software replaced the SYSDIAG utilities which had served the community for several decades. CSTM put the same diagnostics at hand for both HP-UX and MPE/iX servers. But CSTM needs passwords to run its diagnostics, codes which HP promised to provide to the community, but remain undelivered today.

It's been awhile since that promise (think the Rich Sevcik era, going back into the early 2000s), but this summer CTSM needed a patch to keep working in 2009. Yes, even when HP won't provide but a shadow of its 3000 support, the system diagnostics used by HP CEs, third party supporters and even customers require some updating.

All this brings us to patch ODINX19C, which restores the customer/support provider's ability to access the online diagnostics. HP's notes on the new patch say that the current CSTM password tables will stop working on Jan. 1, 2009 — coincidentally, the same day when HP Support loses its lab facilities for the 3000 and MPE/iX.

Stan Sieler of Allegro Consultants, which supports 3000 customers, confirmed that " the password mechanism was date-sensitive, and had no code for dates past 2009." No matter who's using CSTM, Sieler posed a question about the situation which illustrates HP's continuing role in a 3000 market it claims to be exiting at the end of 2010.

Sieler asked, "The real question is, when support disappears from HP, how do people access the diagnostics?"

Okay, CSTM might not be a major part of your 3000 ownership experience, or a key tool in your sustainability plan. (You do have one of those plans, don't you, if you're homesteading? Pretty cowboy-like if not.) But CSTM is just one of many MPE/iX tools and modules which are getting their last housecleaning this year. HP announced a raft of patches for parts of the OS over the past month. Skipping them can cause problems you don't want in 2009, or even now. Using an un-fixed CSTM can result in a System Abort, in a worst case. Sieler said getting the passwords out of the way can make these diagnostics a tool for the community.

In CSTM, some tools are usable by anyone, and some require a password.  Of the password-protected ones, many would be usable by knowledgeable customers and by third-party support providers... if they know the password.

Putting a new password table into CSTM is not the kind of project the HP IT Response Center will be able to accomplish. In fact, there are more experts now outside HP who can do this kind of "sustaining engineering" than the number inside HP. They're retired experts, like HP's Mike Paivinen, or those who have started new jobs at places like K-12 provider QSS (Jeff Vance, Mark Bixby) or consulting for Marxmeier Software (Lars Appel).

Much of HP's 3000 lab is migrating to the third party environment, or hanging up its "white coats" to pursue new careers like becoming professors in math. Since the experts will be working outside of HP, what good will it do for Hewlett-Packard to keep control of MPE/iX, things like passwords? The vendor won't tell anybody how much control it wants to retain, now that we're in the "Cone of Silence" era on HP's 3000 plans. But issues like updating access to a repair suite do raise the question once more: What's in the future for HP's ownership of MPE/iX?

HP Certified Pro outsourcing

Last week I mentioned my trip to the HP Store at the recent HP Technology Forum. The HP Merchandise store sold branded items — most priced under $50 — to tout Hewlett-Packard and especially the HP Certified Professional status of the wearer or bearer. Things like a simple USB laptop light ($6), or the handsome $155 Barrington Captain's Bag, shown below.

This outreach is part of what a trade conference is all about, why you travel and put up with the flight delays,107-degree heat and lines at the airport taxi stands (25 minutes on a Monday afternoon, I kid you not). You want to touch that bag to take home a badge honoring and bragging about the HP certification you have earned.

But HP is not in the bag business. It's in the service sector, selling what it sells at the HP Merchandise Store. Where in the world does all this stuff come from? It didn't seem expensive (well, maybe the Captain's bag). So where did HP go to get what it sold in Las Vegas. My current Amex statement revealed all. Everything is outsourced these days, especially marketing.

The goods in the Merchandise Store come from the warehouse shelves of Schroepfer Wessels Jolesch, a Plano, Texas-based merchandise marketing company. The charge for $15.09 in my participatory journalism budget said "SWJ LLC," so a-hunting I went to see what that string of letters meant.

It's pretty amazing to see the vast array of gimcracks and genuine goods on offer at SWJ, or "Swidge," as the company likes to call itself. You can buy whips, then have your logo, whether it's "HP Invent" or "Master ASE," stamped on them. Or just about anything else, it seems, from looking at the Swidge site. Water heaters, it says on the menu of dozens of items. I didn't see an option for the 20-gallon or 40-gallon models.

Did HP and lots of other people give this kind of stuff away in years past, instead of selling it? You bet. I've got a drawer full of the stuff from 25 years of tromping around conference floors. There was always a Swidge out there turning your garden variety golf glove into a corporate badge. This is just the first year I've been party to a purchase of an HP outsourced operation. The store staff wasn't HP employees, either. The Hewlett-Packard staff was on the expo floor, explaining blade enclosures to everybody — even the press on a pop-in interview.

According to the rules above on that blue sign, a big chunk of the merchandise was off-limits to the rare 3000 pro who'd earned HP CP status for MPE/iX. (That sign didn't keep me from buying something off-limits, strictly by accident. And it's good to know that HP is supporting manufacturing business in China, too. HP 3000s serve a major manufacturer in that country, with no migration in the foreseeable future.)

The ability to spend at the Store doesn't matter, considering all the other places a 3000 pro needs to spend — consulting for migration, third party support, spare parts — even training in vendor-neutral environments like Linux. We'll wait to see if there's ever a chance to shop on any expo floor in a Linux store, full of penguin products.

MPE shell expands, with explanation

Way back in the middle 1990s HP added the Posix shell to the HP 3000, so customers who had Unix and MPE running in the same shop could train operators and managers with a single set of commands. Posix was a plus, making the 3000 appear more Unix-like (which seemed important at the time).

Over the years, however, Posix has been a feature to be discovered for most 3000 managers and operators. (By the way, the computer's operating system was renamed from MPE/XL to MPE/iX just for this added Posix feature).

But enough history; Posix is still on the 3000 and remains a powerful interface tool, an alternative to the CI interface that HP created for the system. You can even call Posix commands from the CI, a nifty piece of engineering when it can be done. That's not always possible, though. A customer wanted to know how to "expand wildcard shells" using Posix. He tried from the CI and had this story to relate.

:LL /BACKUPS/HARTLYNE/S*
ls: File or directory “/BACKUPS/HARTLYNE/S*” is not found

So how do I do this? I need to be able to tell tar to archive all of the reels of a STD STORE set via a regexp.  It does not work in tar, and it apparently does not in ls, so I speculate that there is something special about the innovation of Posix utilities from the CI that I am not aware of. What is it?

Jeff Vance, the 3000 CI guru at while at HP who now develops at K-12 app vendor QSS, had this reply:

   Wildcards on most (all) Unix systems, including Posix implementations, are done by the shell, not the individual programs or in-lined shell commands, like ls in your example. A solution is to run the shell and execute ll from within.

Greg Stigers then supplied the magic Posix shell command to do the expansion:

SH.HPBIN.SYS '-c "/bin/ls -l /BACKUPS/HARTLYNE/S*"'

In a note of thanks, the customer said that getting the answer by working with the HP 3000 community's newsgroup "is like having an entire IT department right outside my door."

An interesting footnote if you've read this far: The Posix shell for the 3000 is one part of the operating system not built by HP. The shell was licensed by HP from MKS, and Hewlett-Packard pays royalties to MKS so Posix can work inside of MPE/iX. That's an issue that OpenMPE and HP will have to clear up before any emulation or source-license arrangements can be worked out.

For now, enjoy using Posix as a way to get familiar with the commands in Unix systems. In the great majority of instances, these commands are the same.