3000 NewsWire

Link-In to your 3000 Community to discuss

Starting today, the professional social network LinkedIn adds new features to make it easy for HP 3000 customers to discuss problems, solutions and issues about the Transition Era. LinkedIn has an "HP 3000 Community" group with more than 30 members, one that's been growing slowly but steadily since we kicked it off last month. These numbers are very comparable to the myCommunity members at Connect who have posted an HP 3000 profile — and Connect has reached out to encourage LinkedIn members to join the Connect group.

Linked In also has a "HP3000 - Bill & Dave's Excellent Machine" group to join. Before today, these groups were a portal to other Linked In members, professionals whose background you needed to survey to find an answer to a question in a one-on-one message. But the new features promise much more collaboration.

Linked In is a free membership, and building a network of connections is easy and fun. Sign up at linkedin.com, or log in if you're already a member, then type "HP 3000 Community" in the Groups Search box at the top right. I'll do the routing to ensure you get into the group. LinkedIn reports that "Together you have made Groups one of the top features on LinkedIn." The social network explains the upgrades:

This Friday, we will be adding several much-requested features to your group:

• Discussion forums: Simple discussion spaces for you and your members. (You can turn discussions off in your management control panel if you like.)
• Enhanced roster: Searchable list of group members.
• Digest emails: Daily or weekly digests of new discussion topics which your members may choose to receive. (We will be turning digests on for all current group members soon, and prompting them to set to their own preference.)
• Group home page: A private space for your members on LinkedIn.

The LinkedIn managers add, "We're confident that these new features will spur communication, promote collaboration, and make your group more valuable to you and your members. We hope you can come by LinkedIn on Friday morning to check out the new functionality and get a group discussion going by posting a welcome message."

I'll do my part to kick off a message today on the discussion board. I hope you will join Linked In, become a group member to learn and share what you know and what you're trying.

HP advises against replacing what you built

Vice President Lynn Anderson spread HP's message of change at the recent HP Technology Forum. I sat down with her to discuss HP's approach to replacement of 3000 applications during a migration versus the task of rewriting. HP prefers the latter to getting an off the shelf app in Unix or Windows to duplicate the years of architecture and development under MPE/iX.

We also talked about how nearly half of you will be retired from in three years, according to an HP study. Start planning your future accordingly if you're staying on board, she advises, by keeping your "fresh until" date well into the years beyond, with new skills. At the HP Technology Forum, I asked her about the replacement versus Linux or Unix rewrites.

3000 customers tend to fall into one of two categories: those who know more about their business than computing, and those who built their IT installations, doing it themselves, from the bit-level upward. What do you think about the prospect of Linux suiting the migration needs of that latter group? Or should they look to match up with a replacement app?

    Matching can disappoint. We say don’t look at what you want your application to do today, but what do you want it to do tomorrow. [For the DIY customer], do you have the personnel?

   I think back to when I was a programmer. We had a guy in our shop who liked to think of himself as writing elegant code. Then he left, and when we had to make a change to his code, we literally had to draw straws, because nobody wanted to touch it.

   You have to look at that when judging a workforce. We just did a study on datacenter transformation, and by the year 2011 45 percent of the IT workforce will be retired.

So how will this impact choices to move forward with IT?

    We tell these customers you will never get anything to replace what you had built. The question is what will you want to do tomorrow, and are you going to have the staff to be able to go into the code.

Why so few remaining in IT?

    I don’t think we have done a good job of selling the value of a career in technology. During the dot-coms it was a bit cool, but it was never about people doing the IT work. It was more on the idea side. And you know what? It still is cool, and it can be a great way to make a living.

Plenty of 3000 customers make a living that way. HP has started to call them “technologists.” Do you see technologists as typical influencers in the 3000 ecosystem?

    I do. And I think over the years companies — and I’m not saying this about HP — who have forgotten about these influencers. Technologists still play a big role in organizations. There are not too many CIOs that are going to make a decision diametrically opposed to their organization. Based on that, we need to get the information out there so the technologist can understand it.

    With me starting out in that technology environment, I understand. We got our stripes in the 3000, and it was “live free or die — MPE only.”

So how do you influence those technology customers to dig in to new concepts and processes like ITIL?

    No matter what technology you deliver at work, that doesn’t mean you should stop learning about other technologies. You can think of bread at the grocery store — what are you doing to reset your “Best Before” date?

HP says staying fresh maintains influence

Lynn Anderson came to the HP Technology Forum to spread influence, but she did it using utensils forged in early HP 3000 work. She’s an HP Vice President, but started her career working on an HP 3000 in the mill town where she grew up. A Series II system displayed her first MPE colon prompt.

Later on in programming and system engineering for HP, She was a network specialist for MPE, a job that included a high point of bringing up the first HP 1000-HP 3000 local area network: Two platforms HP no longer sells. Anderson laughed at the wonder of such a connection everyone felt then. “Real time meets all-the-time,” she said

With that kind of in-the-tech-trenches background, HP sends Anderson to briefings like the ones at the Technology Forum to make contact with influencers whose roots are like hers: at the byte level from years ago. Apparently I was such an influencer, even if the byte level is removed from my skill set. HP offered up Anderson for me to interview at the Forum, and we spent a half-hour talking about what has been in the 3000 customer’s community, and what HP hopes it will include in the future.

Your title says that you’re a VP whose job is Influencer Marketing. What does that mean in the HP of 2008?

   My team is responsible for media relations across the Technical Support Group, executive communications both internal and external. We bring pieces of our portfolio to deliver a solution to market, and we do some strategy and planning. That’s my team. We focus on those groups of individuals who ultimately influence end-user customers.

HP’s head of TSG Ann Livermore led off with an HP-UX question in her keynote today, assuring customers that the OS would be at HP a long time. What can you say to assure the 3000 customers HP-UX won’t meet the MPE/iX fate? Is Linux a safer long-term play?

    We sit down with our customers and help them select the best route, whether it’s into HP-UX, whether it’s into Linux, or whether it’s Microsoft. We’re the only vendor who can provide a single hardware platform that can run multiple operating systems.

    There are opportunities to move from the 3000 platform to all three of these operating systems. The goal is “what’s your business need? What kinds of high availability do you need?” In some cases, it’s picking the right operating system for an application. There are cases where companies do run multiple operating systems.
    It’s all about making the best the right one for the job at hand. We announced that our NonStop servers now have blade capability. NonStop is truly 24x7, where the mission is truly critical.

There’s another migration ongoing at HP. How are the customers taking to moving to Integrity from PA-RISC servers in the HP 9000 marketplace? Has Integrity’s domination become complete?

    In our latest quarter, Integrity revenues were up 35 percent.

So does Integrity represent more than three fourths of sales for what HP calls its Business Critical Servers which are not “Industry Standard Servers?”

    It’s not quite total dominance [for Integrity], but we don’t split up the revenues between our product lines. Integrity is still a healthy contributor to the top and bottom line for us.

STORE options you may not know

STORE is the default backup tool for every HP 3000, but this bedrock of backup has options which might exceed expectations for a subsystem utility. Gilles Schipper, the support guru of more than two decades on the 3000, told us about a few STORE sweet spots this year at the GHRUG conference.

To start, using the :MAXTAPEBUF option can cut a four-hour backup to three hours or less. Schipper says that increasing the buffer size default to 32K, from the usual 16K, speeds up the backup when STORE sees MAXTAPEBUF. "That's a pretty good payback for one option."

Backups don't need to be specified with an @.@.@ command to be complete. "People should really be using the forward slash," he says, "because it's easy to accidentally omit the Posix file structure if you're not careful constructing your fileset backup." The slash is so much better that a backup specified by HP's TurboStore will replace any @.@.@ operation with "./" Combining @.@.@ with exclusions can lead to omitting files which should have been in a backup.

Schipper says that including a directory on a backup is smart, but private volumes in use on a 3000 need more than :directory as an option.

"If you're using private volumes and the directory option, you'll only get the system volume directory — and you will not get the private volume directories," he says. The backup must explicitly specify the volumes through the ONVS= command, using the long name of the private volume.

The partdb option on a STORE command ensure that any 3000 databases which are incomplete will get backed up. Without partdb, if a root file "doesn't have its corresponding data sets, the root file won't get stored. It's silly, but partdb ensures they get stored." A privileged file can also look like a partial database, so partdb brings those files into a STORE backup.

A 3000 with HP's TurboStore, rather than just the default STORE, can take advantage of the :online command. "It will give you zero downtime, if you have that version from HP," Schipper says. But that begins to drift away from the no-cost STORE options available to any HP 3000 administrator or owner.

Keeping up links to 3000 info

The Web is well-known for dead links, those Web addresses which return nothing but a "404 Not Found" message, or something more clever from some providers. The HP 3000 has been the subject of Web information for so long that its Web links bear some scrutiny these days, when parts of your ecosystem can go dormant. Some of the older information is on HP's Jazz Web server, where one dated page shows us how much has changed since the start of the century. (We'd like to see more "Not Found" pages like the comic one at left, an effort to spark vacating the chair in front of the keyboard.)

At a Web page titled "How to get HPe3000 information online, there's a good top half of the page with instructions on how to subscribe to the HP 3000 newsgroup/mailing list. But once you read beyond the link to 3k Associates' e3000 FAQ, the links get spotty. It begins with a reference to the HP e3000 Answer Line, an experiment hosted by the now-defunct user group Interex.

Another casualty that lingers in HP reference page is the 3kworld site, a venture started by Client Systems in the months before Y2K. 3kworld didn't outlive HP's first announced end of support date — but a major portion of its material was supplied by the NewsWire, so much of what was online is still available.

Perhaps a greater loss, still listed on the HP page, is the pair of e3000 vendor lists, solutionstore3000.com and the HP 3000 vendor directory maintained by Triolet Systems' founder Brian Duncombe. Of the former we know too much; SolutionStore was a NewsWire venture of the 1990s, until a Web provider went dark with all data. Duncombe checked in with a similar outcome for his labors, but his information survives at OpenMPE.

Duncombe did a cleaner exit than we managed with SolutionStore. He contributed the source of his vendor listings to OpenMPE last year at the request of director Donna Hofmeister and Webmaster John Dunlop.

The remains of the list are still online at the great Tech Wiki created by 3k's Chris Bartram, who still tends to the server hosting the archived articles of the 3000 NewsWire 1996-2005. You can look through a list by vendor category or vendor name at the HP 3000 Twiki site. Even update an entry, if you're so inclined to help.

Duncombe, who started his project in the 1990s and maintained it for nearly a decade, wrote several popular performance utilities for the HP 3000 during the 1980s and '90s. He then had to wage a lawsuit campaign against a series of companies to get paid for his most popular product, and finally prevailed several years ago after what seemed like a decade of court jousting and delays. Of his vendor list, cross-indexed and including hundreds of companies, Duncombe said

I was never able to generate more than an infinitely small interest in vendors keeping me up to date. The majority of the vendor list was generated by me from materials that I picked up at conferences or e-mail references. Most updates were likewise generated by me, although some were as a result of a complaint about inaccurate information by a user, and my [subsequent] research into the specific item. It was a labor of love that I had to end when I stopped going to conferences.

Google quickly finds Adager, Flexibase, RAC, QTP, MPE/iX 6.5, and so forth. The cross-referencing by subject was useful in my vendor list, but my suggestion [to OpenMPE] was that it is not worth the effort.

The path of my pursuit in this update of Web links turns out to be circular. I located that HP Web page that sports long-dead links (Interex expired three years ago) by searching with Google. To be precise, though, the HP page turned up in a search using Google Minus Google, an engine built around Google's that eliminates results from Google's Web sites like Blogger, YouTube and Knol.

As Duncombe says, Google turns out to be a great way to find HP 3000 vendors who you already know by name. But search results on "HP3000 vendors" start with the great hp3000links.com Web page, where a pull-down menu will take you directly to a 3000 vendor's Web page. Know the vendor, find their page. That site, coincidentally, is maintained by OpenMPE's Dunlop in another labor of love.

As for Duncombe, he's retired from his labors to found a chapter of Habit for Humanity, volunteering as well as "keeping busy getting back into photography and woodworking. I still lurk on [the 3000 mailing list] and see the messages from those still on the platform. I understand that for a small company that is perfectly happy with MPE, it is difficult to migrate, and that is a business decision that can be taken with the known facts."

OpenMPE keeps knocking on HP's door

Once a month, or sometimes twice, the OpenMPE advocacy group holds a meeting by teleconference. The group's directors discuss the big questions about 3000 life after HP leaves the market. They sometimes discuss these issues with Jeff Bandle of HP, where the details then fall under the confidential code of executive session.

This week the group posted meeting minutes from May and June discussions, where progress on a 3000 community resource was revealed. HP expressed a little interest in getting the programs and applications transferred from the Invent3k public development server — hosted at HP — onto OpenMPE's HP 3000s. From the minutes:

June 12: While there's been interest expressed, there's been little follow-up. [Director] Anne Howard is aware of a company that's retiring many MPE systems. Perhaps a system would come available that way. Another possibility is to formally ask for HP's Invent3k [server].

June 26: HP seems agreeable to giving OpenMPE a backup tape of Invent3k. There is an issue with third-party software that needs addressing.

While Invent3k and its assets are not yet outside of HP, this is a small victory of some note. HP will at least begin to transfer one 3000-related asset out of the company. And so, the vendor must create a process to do this, one that might pave the way for other transfers.

The complete listing of meeting minutes is available on the OpenMPE Web site. Reading them in order shows the efforts which nine volunteers continue to make on licensing issues, asset transfers and other work needed to keep 3000s running long after HP leaves.

This work will be done on behalf of some customers, including large manufacturers, who will be using 3000s for several years after HP's support ends. One major aircraft maker has no plans to turn off their HP 3000 until 2013 — working around an SAP implementation team schedule that has no regard for HP's 3000 migration timetable, or warnings of risks.

App supplier advances, holds line for 3000 sites

Software suppliers have made decisions during the past year or two on the future of their HP 3000 solutions. Even the most ardent do-it-yourselfers will be using such third party solutions on a 3000, ranging from utilities like Adager to languages like Speedware to helper apps to manage communication between servers. STR Software, which sells software in that last category, has been helping hundreds to migrate — but its founder says the company will never give up on a 3000 installation.

Ben Bruno of STR updated us on the company's migration efforts, which began in 1992 when a customer asked for a Unix version of FAX/3000 (as it was called at the time.) Over the years the 3000 software evolved into AventX MPE, which earned a spot on 581 HP 3000 servers. More than 100 still send support fees to STR, Bruno reports.

He also says that the company's single largest customer of all time, First American Home Buyers, recently completed their replacement of HP 3000s with Windows servers, and "they moved with our product, too." Combining a mix of migration targets to STR's companion products on Linux, Windows and Unix, along with unflagging support of 3000 customers, mixed revenues arrive for sales and support and "the entire company wins," Bruno says.

STR aims to make a stand with a goal of keeping half of its existing AventX MPE business:

We have 107 licenses paying an annual software and hardware (=fax server) support fee. We have another 40 who still use it, but don’t pay support because it is too darned reliable!  Our goal is to retain at least half of these remaining 107 active and 40 non-paying licenses forever on our other platform solutions. Although the number of active licenses continues to decrease, we also continue to “migrate” them to our companion products on Linux, Unix and Windows with a free license transfer. Unused support transfers as well.  Last year alone, we migrated nine MPE licenses to Windows free of charge. We see many of the Ecometry and MANMAN companies migrating to Windows.

The best news is that with enhanced technologies that include inbound and outbound desktop fax, OCR, advance routing, input into databases, and so forth, we significantly increase their use of our products, and that leads to increased initial sales revenue and recurring support revenue.  The entire company wins.

I can honestly say that 20 of our MPE customers will most likely never move from the HP 3000.  They simply don’t have the money to do so. For example, Measurement Specialties bought several [3000] spares to keep MPE alive. 

I thank one of my MPE customers, Boat America, who in 1992 said, “Ben, I can’t find a Unix (Sequent server) fax solution that has what yours has for me. Please consider writing it in UNIX.”  Well it took five years of a complete C++ rewrite on the core product, and another seven-plus years in the major ERP markets of Oracle and SAP, but we have been solidly selling in non-MPE markets post Y2K. I am certainly glad that we plowed the MPE profits into the development of the non-MPE products. Aligning our niche focus with Oracle EBS and hiring talented staff has been wise too.

Notably, for the 3000 user who intends to stay on the platform indefinitely, STR has the backing of its sales in the non-3000 markets — to keep MPE support online as long as a single customer needs it.

Finally, I have no intention of stopping support of our fax product on MPE.  We will support it until our last customer leaves the platform and stops paying support. Or perhaps, I die, which I don’t plan to do either!

Investing in IT, and ITIL

[Editor's Note: Migration as well as homesteading sites need to accommodate changes, a task which e3000 Platinum Migration Partner Birket Foster addresses in today's article. One key tool to keep pace with these changes — the loss of a vendor's support team, a fresh sustainability plan to replace departing 3000 experts — is ITIL, Version 3, an information library that outlines best practices for IT managers.

Even the smallest of HP 3000 customers should be getting familiar with ITIL. "If you get acquired by a company that knows and practices ITIL processes, you'll get run over," Foster says. He shared other ideas about managing IT as an investment in his article. You can leave comments at the article's end or share them directly with Foster at birket@mbfoster.com.]

By Birket Foster

The world has certainly changed since 2001 especially for HP e3000 users — it is not just the HP-supplied parts, services and support, it is the whole ecosystem. Folks who were the captains of industry, managing robust growing companies for their organization have retired. For some of you this will ring a bell. There are very few HP 3000-savvy folks under 40, and probably none under 30. That means as more members of the community retire the replacements just won’t be there.

Probably 75 percent of the companies we visit don’t have the HP 3000 resources to make major changes of their application or the operating environment any longer. This puts companies at risk. The risk that if something goes bump in the night, the team will not know how to recover. Is your 3000 in a tested disaster recovery plan? (It ought to be – it is always easier to catch something in test then during the real thing). Developing and implementing a plan is a significant IT investment goal for your community.

Investment in IT is always related to applications. I don’t mean Microsoft office, but the applications that make it possible for organizations to take orders, build, ship and bill; or reserve a seat on a plane; or register a student, rent a car, or build an aircraft.

Yes, there are real companies in all those businesses still running on an HP 3000s. Some of them remain there because their investment in IT is working through a 5- or 7-year cycle, and then if the business is in good shape then they will take on the project of moving to something new. Some have failed in their attempt to migrate at the cost of tens of millions of dollars. In other cases, corporate is sending in the SAP team in a couple of years, and it will be five more years till they can decommission the 3000.

Your organization ought to have a dashboard which relates to the current state of each application and the ecosystem around it. The ecosystem includes staff, surround code, support plans and pledges from your third parties. And your senior management team should be made aware of the state of your systems. This includes all the tools to design/change, develop, test, integrate, deploy, operate, support the application plus the documentation, and the HR required to support and train new team members for each of the phases in the application lifecycle.

In a one-sentence motto, if you can't measure what you're currently doing, you shouldn't be doing it.

I am a big frameworks guy, so my thought is that if you have a framework you should compare what you have against an industry neutral way of looking at things – ITIL. This framework ensures you stay focused innovate and do the changes every company needs. For example, if you stay on the HP 3000 you need a plan to replace people who leave and take 3000 experience along with them.

ITIL v3, published in May 2007 with a lot of input from HP volunteers, comprises five key volumes:

1. Service Strategy
2. Service Design
3. Service Transition
4. Service Operation
5. Continual Service Improvement

If you are serious about your organization’s IT you will need to have something similar. Colleges, universities and companies such as HP offer courses and certification in ITIL. You can build your dashboard once you understand the level of maturity your organization has in IT systems. Whether you buy commercial off the shelf systems or roll your own, you need a framework to make your systems supportable – plus something to help these systems focus on supporting your business goals and objectives.

Your HP 3000 can fit into an ITIL, and you will gather enough information to transfer the support of your applications to the next generation of employees at your site. I hope you are doing great work in the care and feeding of your HP 3000 based applications — and that this short piece has made you think.

Overseas biz, PCs spark HP quarter

Earning a profit is the first item in the vaunted HP Way list of goals. Hewlett-Packard met the goal in its most recent quarter — $2 billion worth — by relying on the surge in business outside the US.

A fiscal 2008 Q3 report shows the company increased its profits by 14 percent over last year's Q3, and Hewlett Packard increased its sales by 10 percent to more than $28 billion in the quarter. But analysts took note not of large servers or building blade business, but the 20 increase in unit shipments of PCs. Printers, meanwhile, have seen their growth in earnings and sales slow.

The report's details off the HP Investor Relations Web site show a company earning in every sector, by varying degrees. The Business Critical Servers group, home of some replacement solutions HP offers to migrating 3000 sites, posted another quarter of growth, still trailing the Industry Standard Server business that doesn't rely on the HP's Integrity servers running Itanium chips.

HP told analysts in today's call that BCS revenue was up just 2 percent year over year; Integrity revenue rose 18 percent from last year's Q3 and now makes up 78 percent of BCS revenue. HP-UX sites are making transitions away from PA-RISC servers to aid in this Integrity growth. Existing HP enterprise customers, such as the HP 3000 migrators, are a big part of why Integrity sales are increasing.

Many HP 3000 customers won't be moving to the Integrity line of servers, choosing to advance to Intel-based Industry Standard Servers such as the Proliant line. A Windows installation might not be the best long term choice to replace an HP 3000, given the state of Microsoft's innovation and the environment's enterprise capabilities, according to one leading 3000 migration company.

But 3000 sites are investing in such solutions to help lift those ISS numbers. New form factors are also contributing to the boost. HP said that sales of HP's blade servers — really just a new way to employ chassis for compact servers — grew 66 percent over the same period's sales last year.

"Customers are increasingly implementing HP's blade system to expand their IT infrastructure," said Cathie Lesjak, Hewlett-Packard CFO, "and this quarter we shipped our millionth blade."

Business was buoyed by the sales outside of the Americas during the period. Americas revenue growth came in at 5 percent compared to last year's Q3; growth in Europe, Asia Pacific and elsewhere increased 15 percent over the 2007 quarter.

HP Services, the last group in HP with any plan or authority to determine HP's  3000's end-game through 2010, enjoyed HP Services had a strong quarter with revenue growth of 14% over the prior year period. We "top-line strength in every business," Hurd said, "with technology services and consulting and integration revenue up 13 percent year-over-year and outsourcing revenue up 18 percent."

The quarterly report, which beat analyst estimates for revenues and earnings, might be the last one to show HP as a company grounded by its computer and print solutions. The $13.25 billion EDS acquisition is in play, and is expected to close by the end of this month, but it wasn't a part of the report. Once EDS joins the HP operations, the company will report on the work of an extra 130,000 employees and $44 billion in sales. This time around, HP Services recorded $4.8 billion in sales and $548 million in operating profits.

EDS will bring a wide range of services into HP's operations, ranging from the operation and maintenance of servers including HP 3000s to manning help desks. The company has mobilized a wave of its staff equal to the effort in acquiring Compaq in 2002.

"The [planning] is going well," Hurd said, "and we are confident in the benefits of this business combination will bring to customers, partners and to shareholders. We have over 500 HP and EDS people dedicated full-time to the integration team."

Don't fear the IPv6 reaper

Many technologies will emerge which don't have HP's MPE/iX blessing. That is, the vendor will not provide lab resources to support new tech on your 3000. As of the end of this year, HP won't even have a lab on call for its remaining support customers.

One technology which gets mentioned as a reason to migrate is the new Internet Protocol, IPv6. There's no support in MPE/iX networking for this new protocol, which is designed to expand the world's IP addresses much like the phone companies went to 10-digit numbers during the 1990s. By some estimates, more than 85 percent of the available IP addresses are already used up.

What will HP 3000 users do — some say by the end of 2010 — when these addresses run out? Is this the kind of "dead-air deadline" which US television customers face by early 2009, when no more analog broadcasts are allowed?

Not at all. Just like those TV viewers can buy a cheap converter to receive the new technology signals, HP 3000 sites won't have to change a thing about their existing networks and IP addresses. HP says that IPv6 is not a show stopper, but a new set of suburbs around the almost built-out city of networking.

From an HP update at the recent Technology Forum, the vendor's Yanick Pouffary, HP Distinguished Technologist, reports these timelines

• 2008/09: Customers will start using IPv6
• Will take years to upgrade infrastructure completely
• HP Recommended approach - Dual IPv4/IPv6
• Do NOT expect customers to turn IPv4 off any time soon
• IPv6 will be deployed in conjunction with IPv4 for decades
• Very few products or network infrastructure supports IPv6-only environment today

To be sure, any new IP addresses a company needs after the end of 2010 might be IPv6 protocol-based. Unless you can buy an IPv4 IP address, or a dozen, from someone who already has them.

And unlike the MPE/iX licenses which your vendor tries to control, IP addresses are not regulated by an organization trying to take out the old numbers. ICANN, the international IP address foundry, might have a lot of problems and blind spots. But it won't be in the business of keeping older technology from working alongside newer tech, or advising the world that IPv4 is risky.

That last point makes us wonder. If IPv4 can operate alongside IPv6, and the newer tech is designed to accommodate the older protocol, why can't Hewlett-Packard — the Number One computer company in the world — do the same thing with the HP 3000? After all, IBM has made its AS/400 servers operate in harmony with Unix, Linux, Windows.

IBM now calls that technology Series i, but HP calls it old, tech that the Big Blue customers should abandon. If that message sounds familiar to HP 3000 users, it should. A surprising number of former HP 3000 division staff are working to get the Series i "mainframe" users to switch to HP's servers.

We'll just take a wild bet that Series i will have IPv6 capability. After all, everything in the HP stable does. Everything? Perhaps the 3000 community should take HP CTO Shane Robson at his word when he said last year:

All of our platforms are IPv6 capable, everything from the handhelds and PCs to the servers. It's an exciting opportunity. It's an exploding growth area and we're right in the middle of it and have been for some time.

More time than than you might imagine. HP's Pouffary was a Founding Member of the IPv6 Forum in 1999 — yeah, two full years before the vendor decided to kill off its HP 3000 business. But "all of our platforms" means what HP's supporting now. Everything in the Business Critical Server stable except the HP e3000, as HP likes to call it. How's that for irony? HP renames your server with an "e" in 1998 to signal the 3000 is Internet ready. Then your business platform is only one that HP leaves behind in its 21st Century Internet plans.