Practice independence in your community

Here in the US we're observing our Independence Day this weekend, a celebration that echoes my hopes of independence for HP 3000 community members. Those who are homesteading on the system beyond HP's schedule have already chosen an independent path. They depend on new partners for support. Some community members have chosen the independence of Linux and open source, too, to supplement their 3000 computing power.

I also believe that independence is essential to those members staying with HP. Those companies migrating need to speak out freely about their experiences. As a journalist for almost 30 years, I've seen a decline in the independence of speaking on the record. I'd love to start a revolution in that regard and roll back the calendar, but anonymous sources have become a bulwark in reporting. The journalism community represented at the Washington, DC Newseum — a fine stop for any citizen-tourist in that town — has grave doubts about anonymous sources. We reporters trade credibility for trust when we need to use these sources.

I'd use fewer of these with more customers going on the record. Public meetings, open to both users and the press, are becoming rare indeed. It's up to 3000 community members to speak out online, where the speaker has more control of what's being reported.

In fact, the demise of public meetings was one factor in passing up the HP Technology Forum & Expo this year. This is first year since 1985 that I haven't attended a national-level HP user conference. After 24 annual events in a row, it seemed that things have changed between HP and the press. Last year I complained about the frustration of incomplete press access at HPTF. Things have shifted in HP's press approach, which makes the Internet and blogs the reasonable alternative to hearing community members' voices.

There's been a bit of good change, like hearing HP talk live to the analysts about quarterly reports via the Internet. But when Computerworld is standing outside a meeting door alongside the 3000 NewsWire, then HPTF starts to look like a restricted event. The user forums were ideal for a journalist who wants in-person connections with new sources. Users voicing opinions and telling stories about their customer experience is the meat of a conference. I understand how that won't serve HP as well as it did in the 80s or even the 90s. Sometimes you just have to accept changes.

As a community member you don't have to accept a less independent strategy. HP does operate a few forums online where customers can share opinion and experience. But the filtering is profound these days, probably reflecting the whole spin dance companies do with the media. You control your statements if you can speak out in places like Twitter, Linked In and Facebook (all of which have 3000-related followings and groups), as well as the Connect user group's online MPE forum. We'll be hearing more about that group in awhile, according to Connect board director Chris Koppe.

Until then and beyond, I hope you'll share your independent statements with your community and me here at the NewsWire. Enjoy and exercise your independence as a citizen, community member, or both.

Open source community grows opportunity

Open source software is taking a fresh step into territory more comfortable to commercial users. The HP 3000 world is closer than most to embracing open source as a validated solution, in part because your world has employed user-created software for 3000 sites since the 1970s.

Of late, that kind of help has emerged from stewards around the world updating Samba, Apache, or the latest extension to the power of Linux. But another category is emerging with fresh opportunity: the commercial open source software organization. Openbravo, an ERP app being introduced to 3000 migration candidates by Entsgo, is among the best-organized of these solutions. Its community gathers and creates the Community Edition using a Wiki for free, but Openbravo also offers an Openbravo Network implementation including an annual professional support subscription service.

Openbravo is so complete that the software includes tools available for non-developers to modify the app suite. While this might sound like a risky move, many 3000 owners have little in the way of traditional development staff. The 3000 was offered to the non-DP kind of customer. That's Data Processing, for anyone searching for IT or MIS as a label for the technologists in the community.

Even though Openbravo is offered with source code included, these tools give customization to users who know business processes better than COBOL or C.

If you look at the Openbravo community, says Entsgo's Engagement Manager Sue Kiesel, "it isn't just developers. It's users, too, because they have tools for people like me, who really aren't technology people, so we can modify the code."

Kiesel said she wrote add-on modules to Openbravo during Entsgo's training for the app. "We also modified existing forms and lookup tables, and added content. It's very easy to do." These tools operate through a Web-based interface.

In addition to making changes to handling processes like this, the application's published source can be modified. Under the terms of the Openbravo Public License Version 1.1, any modifications a user makes to the published source code must be made available, just like many other open source solutions.

Any Modification which you create or to which you contribute must be made available in Source Code form under the terms of this License, either on the same media as an Executable version or via an accepted Electronic Distribution Mechanism to anyone to whom you made an Executable version available.

The software is available as a free download, also in keeping with the open source model. But since it's an ERP-class solution, using a partner such as Entsgo is Openbravo's preferred path into a company. Chief Operating Officer Josep Mitja says

Openbravo is relatively easy to implement compared with many established proprietary solutions, but an ERP implementation typically requires support of qualified IT consultants. For this purpose Openbravo is distributed to end users through its global network of partners. Openbravo partners manage customer relations and provide support to users.

That said, a company that's dedicated to using state-of-the-art tools can do its own development. This is territory where a non-3000 platform will be replacing something like a MANMAN, so the Openbravo app suite is built for industry-standard systems. Openbravo is developed in Java, SQL and PL/SQL. Most developers work on a Linux machine with a PostgreSQL or Oracle database, the Java Development Kit, Apache Ant and Tomcat installed. Java coding and debugging is done in Eclipse.

There is a great deal of headroom for the growth of functionality in Openbravo, plus the means to accomlish it through the commercial open source community.

"It doesn't have the depth and breadth of a MANMAN yet," Kiesel said. "But MANMAN didn't either in its first seven years. It took 20 years. The open source idea is wonderful. But I think the idea that really excites me is the community. The fact is that Openbravo's business model is not based on how much money they can make off of you. It's, 'How we can not only share the burden, but share the rewards.' "

Proving An Open Future for ERP

Open source software is a good fit for the HP 3000 community member, according to several sources. Applied Technologies founder Brian Edminster plans to open a portal for such solutions next month, aimed at the 3000 site looking to modernize. What's more, complete app suites have emerged and rewritten the rules for software ownership. An expert consulting and support firm for ERP solutions is proving that a full-featured ERP app suite, Openbravo, will work for 3000 customers by 2010.

A software collective launched in the '90s by the University of Navarra which has evolved to Openbravo, S.L., Openbravo is utilized by manufacturing firms around the world. Openbravo is big stuff. So large that it is one of the ten largest projects on the SourceForge.net open source repository, until Openbravo outgrew SourceForge. The software, its partners and users have their own Forge running today. HP 3000 support firm the Support Group, inc (tSGi) has put its Entsgo spinoff on track to deploy Openbravo. All the pieces should be ready within nine months, said Entsgo's Engagement Manager Sue Kiesel.

Kiesel and Entsgo are part of the tSGi enterprise that grew up aiding customers of MANMAN, the venerable and stable 3000 ERP app. Entsgo is proving the open source ERP concept this year in segments outside the HP 3000 community. “We’re working on a couple of deals right now that are going to be closing relatively soon,” Kiesel said. “We believe that within six to nine months, the solution will be as robust as MANMAN was at its best.”

Open source solutions can span a wide range of organization, from code forges with revisions and little else to the one-stop feel of a vendor, minus the high costs and long waits. Openbravo is in the latter category, operating with 100 employees and having received more than $18 million in funding. If that doesn't sound much like the Apache and Samba open source experience, then welcome to Open Source 2.0, where subscription fees have replaced software purchases and partner firms join alongside users to develop the software.

Openbravo says the model is "commercial open source business model that eliminates software license fees, providing support, services, and product enhancements via an annual subscription." Entsgo/tSGi business consultant Donnie Poston said the one-stop model makes Openbravo attractive.

“The fact that you have a company that supports it, and you can subscribe to it and verifies it, upgrades it and maintains it — all of that under one company name was enticing to us,” said Poston.

Localization capabilities will be among the last pieces of Openbravo to fall into place, and tSGi president David Floyd says for some HP 3000 owners, the Openbravo solution is ready today. In the meantime, the open source model fits well with HP 3000 strategies.

“In the 3000 community, we’re used to the independence of the open source model,” said Kiesel. “We’re used to tools that are intuitive, and if you look at us, we should be able to embrace open source more than any other community.”

Open source practices turn the enhancement experience upside down for an application. In the traditional model, a single vendor writes software at a significant investment for high profits, then accepts requests for enhancements and repairs. A complex app such as ERP might not even get 10 percent of these requests fulfilled by the average vendor.

The open source community around Openbravo operates like many open source enterprises. Companies create their own enhancements, license them back to the community, and can access bug fixes quickly—all because the ownership is shared and the source code for the app is open.

Entsgo experts such as Kiesel are establishing a trusted advisory resource for Openbravo. Entsgo is a partner to IBM, HP, Oracle, Microsoft, and top-tier ERP vendors, serving small to medium-sized manufacturing and supply chain businesses in Texas and throughout the worldwide manufacturing community.

Ecometry migration steps beyond HP-UX

Migration to HP-UX was only the first step in the Potpourri Group's exit from Ecometry on an N-Class HP 3000. A serious bottleneck in IO forced the catalog and online retailer to migrate in a second phase, settling on the Windows version of the e-commerce software, along with new hardware.

IT manager Bradley Rish said that inefficiencies of the Oracle database design in Ecometry create a performance bottleneck. Their study of IO traffic revealed six files whose performance creates a bottleneck. And the best-performing file of those six "was still 20 times slower than number 7," Rish said, adding that Ecometry's design needs an upgrade to push the Windows edition faster than the 3000's MPE/iX and IMAGE.

Potpourri, which is a holding company that serves 11 other catalog brands, processes 3 million customer transactions a year through phone sales and the Internet. But one half of that 3 million flows in during the high-season's fourth quarter. To handle this business load, the Ecometry installation at Potpourri needed a wide spread of 76 disk spindles and four DL580 servers configured in a cluster. That hardware arrived after Potpourri had already installed and then walked away from an HP-UX RP4400 and its disks.

"Ecometry is IO unfriendly under Oracle," said Rish, "but it's less unfriendly under Windows than HP-UX. It's still not as fast as the 3000. [Ecometry vendor] Escalate need to their act together on optimizing it."

Potpourri's board of directors put the migration in motion during 2005, after a couple of years of research by IT. The exit from the 3000 was based on HP's plans for the computer, not any inability to serve the 200-plus in-house users, plus Web transactions. The HP-UX version of the migration went live in 2007, while the Windows migration went into production mode last year.

Data migration required eight months, more than the IT pros at the company estimated. Rish said that two full-time pros, working the equivalent of one year each, were need to complete the migration to Windows.

Choosing those rack-mounted DL580s from HP got Potpourri to a wider selection of disk platforms. Reconfiguring the SAN environment cost $200,000 in disk hardware, he estimated. The entire project, including Ecometry's consulting, all software licenses and hardware, came in at $1.2-$1.5 million.

Potpourri has been live on Ecometry Windows for a year. Benefits Rish cites for moving away from HP-UX include more affordable Oracle licenses, improved horsepower (the DL580s use multiple 4-core Xeon processors), better options for cluster redundancy, and more in-house expertise. Potpoutrri went from a HP 3000-Windows experience to an all-Windows solution. Although the 3-CPU N-Class server had older disk technology, the Windows installation will need a database revision from Ecometry to meet the 3000-IMAGE performance.

Batch and job processing is an HP 3000 feature that migrating customers need to replace for Windows projects. Rish said Fluent Edge Technologies, which specializes in support of Ecometry sites both homesteading and migrating, suggested the Online Toolworks product SmartBatch.

Rish said that Potpourri is preparing a shift to a new PCI-compliant encryption solution. The company is targeting a May, 2010 go-live date for the new solution; the PCI compliance deadline is July, 2010.

He also said that the experience of migrating onto an Oracle solution has a personal benefit for any IT pro who makes the move. "It makes you much more marketable," he said, adding expertise in the widely-installed database. He added that Oracle's Linux solutions could extend career paths even further, since Oracle says that Linux is its leading development platform.

New solutions assist small shop migrations

Birket Foster likes to envision the world of 2012, a future that guarantees more migration experience will be in the community's consciousness. This spring we talked about this time well away from HP’s influence on 3000 ownership and migration. Foster's MB Foster is sharpening its message this year to reflect its business beyond 3000 expertise. In the years to come the company is booked to help manage migrated applications and environments running for customers MB Foster has migrated.

What has emerged—solutions, utilities, apps, IT strategy—to help the smallest 3000 shops step away?

When we look at the marketplace, it’s the small shops that are going to suffer the most. As soon as they move to Windows, there’s a lot more work to be done that what they had to do for their 3000s. HP 3000s are like a magic thing you set and forget. Moving from a 3000 to the Windows environment means you have to pay attention to things. Like putting new patches on, or some virus will break out. Or fixing the database from time to time to make sure it’s performance-tuned. Although the 3000 databases could get out of hand occasionally, it was very rare.

   The good news for these shops is that those of us who have been migrating people since 2002 have refined the processes and introduced new tools. MB Foster built nine parsers in the last seven years. Some help with moving scripts from MPE-land to Linux or Unix or Windows. Some help with changing and fixing data on the fly, like moving integers stored in a Big Endian format to Little Endian. We also have a scheduler system written for Windows, one more like the job scheduler you had on the 3000.

   We built these kinds of power tools to assist us in migrations. We’ve been moving data since 1985, so we know a lot about the context of data. Our team put a tool together for the datamart team that pulls an IMAGE database into Oracle or SQL Server. This saved people from having to write all the scripts to do that. By the time HP decided to phase out the 3000, we had a tool that got tweaked to generate a few new things to help migration to Unix, Linux and Windows.

Three years from now, does the market miss the final level of HP’s 3000 support?

No, those people are already working with companies like Allegro, Beechglen or Gilles Schipper. I’m sure that the only thing that annoys these guys is HP, announcing that it will keep taking money for support. That’s a long support tail, and HP has already removed resources from it. HP won’t stack any new resources behind it.

So more than a year after the announced HP support exit date, you think HP will continue to sell 3000 support?

I don’t think HP is planning on leaving the 3000 support business. As long as there’s enough money coming in, they’ll do it. And some of the companies just look at the support from an appliance point of view. They tell themselves, “As long as I can say the original vendor will support us, it’s the same as an insurance company that will support us, too.” But when the hurricane comes through, does the insurance company declare bankruptcy and go away? Or does it actually deliver?

In the 3000’s community of 2012, do hardware and environments carry the same weight in strategies?

It’s not just the 3000 market that’s changing. Companies have mergers and acquisitions and they want to make changes. You will be encouraged to come along.

Three years from now we’ll be closer to the point where the hardware is totally irrelevant and the operating system is totally irrelevant. Because the skills sets for those elements will be hard to come by, people who are going to manage and update security for systems will be working for the Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOC) and ISPs. The larger hardware vendors want to do a virtualized farm for an RBOC. The servers you once spent half a million dollars on are being replaced by systems that cost $20,000. The vendors can’t sell the same number of servers, so they have to find a way of consolidating. 

It’s 2012: What business resource is most in demand for 3000 shops making a transition?

It starts with the end-users. Since the HP 3000 is a robust machine, technology is not the issue. But when the end users leave, and the last person who knows how use MANMAN, you will be a world of hurt because you don’t have a training plan for how to train the next person in. It’s really going to be a human resource issue. The 3000 will probably run forever, given that you can swap a motherboard if you need to. The issue will be where to find a person to swap that motherboard, and how would we bring the system back up, and what does that mean to the application when it died in the middle of the day-end batch. Those are the kinds of things people are going to have to deal with at some point.

Trust in the Future, Through Experience

We think of Birket Foster as the community’s futurist. HP has made it clear to the community that the future of the 3000 won’t include Hewlett-Packard. Since the company is now counting down its last two years of support, we wanted to look beyond that coming initial year of post-HP operations. Seeing into that future, with more migrations and fewer homesteaders, seemed a lively exercise for Birket Foster, leader of the HP Platinum Migration Partner MB Foster and a forward thinker. His company has been in this market since 1977, and a Migration Partner since 2002. He wanted to envision the 3000 market 10 years after that date.

   We talked about the world of 2012, three years from now and well away from HP’s influence on 3000 ownership and migration. MB Foster is sharpening its message this year to reflect its business beyond 3000 expertise. In the years to come the company is booked to help manage migrated applications and environments running for customers MB Foster has migrated. Foster calls this mission “providing the knowledge and experience to earn your trust.” We interviewed him just after he returned from fresh field work in the 3000’s e-commerce community.

Now that the HP MPE/iX lab has closed, will it affect the timeline for migrations?

If you’re already determined to stay on the 3000, the closing of the lab means nothing. The HP lab was doing less and less over the last five years anyway. It’s really about the applications, not about the 3000’s technology.

   The correct answer to the question “When do I migrate” is “when the rest of the world changes over to the next major new technology.” When that technology gets introduced, and it cannot be incorporated into the 3000 in any way, then you end up with the 3000 unable to integrate.

    I sat in a meeting with a CFO this month who said, “I’m going to be the last guy standing in the management team. Everybody is moving except me, because I’m the youngster. So guess what? I don’t want this on my watch, so I want to get the process ready. I’d like to start the process to mitigate the risk.” The people in the IT trenches don’t always understand that from a risk-mitigation point of view, management may vote differently. In this company, they brought somebody back from retirement to run the 3000. Does that tell you anything?

Seemingly small things can impact the future of 3000 transitions. Can you think of an element that’s been overlooked that will shape the future of the marketplace?

Availability of people who know how to support the applications. There are lots of hardware guys. It’s not just the people in IT, but also the people on the business side of the world. The last person in accounting who knows how the accounting system works — when he leaves, you’ll have to replace that system. That’s one of the biggest risks people are facing, whether they want to admit it or not.

It’s 2012. How much of the market has made the move by now? Who’s still on the 3000, who’s moved, and why?

Maybe 10 percent of the original installed base is left. Even today there are a lot of machines out there, but I know of companies that have plans afoot to get themselves out of where they currently are. That might not be by 2012, but it’s going to be pretty close to that time. For example, anybody who has a credit card application right now needs to be able to do certain kinds of encryption and protection for credit card numbers. Some applications didn’t handle that very well. If you just got told that your Visa, MasterCard and American Express merchant rights are going to be revoked if you don’t get onto the new application, I guess you don’t have a choice, unless you want to close the doors.

    In the healthcare sector, there are new HIPAA regulations that make you ensure you can see who looked at a patient file. That’s often not going to have been built into the 3000 application.

    It’s going to get harder over the next three years to put out a help wanted call that says “Wanted: HP 3000 programmer.” You’re more likely to get more response if want a Windows programmer, or a .NET programmer. Even a Java programmer, although we’ll see what Oracle does with Java.

    I think you’ll be stuck with the small guys on the 3000. The big guys all will have moved, because they all have some kind of accountability to banking. Banks will start pushing down the chain on how much risk they have in their client base.

    In fact, there are banks already doing that. Companies are having their risk profiles revised when they apply for their annual line of credit to cover payrolls or big inventory buys. Even though you’ve done business for 20 years, there’s somebody at the bank who’s going to look at you to see whether you’re a risk after all. During that process they may look at what’s critical to your business. If that’s an HP 3000, at some point somebody’s going to recognize it’s not HP’s price list anymore, so it represents a risk.

Persevere like print people to migrate

NewsWire Editorial

    Rather than get an early start on the transition process, your community has worked like print journalists. Taking time to get it right, releasing nothing until it’s been proven. In a world where Wikipedia and Twitter and bloggers give us instant gratification, print reporters and old school IT pros say, “People can tell the difference between an apt enhancement and a new solution.”

    The newest choices were not on our menus when we started our careers. Radio and TV told stories in chunks of 30 minutes or far less. News reports that could deliver insight surfaced on the pages of magazines, written weeks earlier, or in newspapers crafted by writers on long deadlines. That was the miracle of creating with slower tools: the sight of polished work rolling off trucks or streaming out of minicomputers onto terminals.

   Before this becomes a bald paean to print and line-by-line programming, let me be clear. The superior tools of today create a better, richer life. But that’s most often true when they are used by seasoned craftsmen. On our May issue’s “inside back,” as we call pages 22-23, I preened a bit about the 1,000 blog articles now on our site. But each time I sit to write one of these, I express thanks for the ability to think fast and write tight, because print would permit us journalists to do nothing less. Maybe you feel the same way when you call on end-user interview skills or testing to deploy a helper app with Linux and open source.

    Since we sent our February print issue into the mails, Denver has lost a 155-year-old newspaper and Detroit readers can’t pick a paper off their doorsteps four days a week. Print is perishing, little by little. But the demise of paper will be a very slow process, with steps as subtle as erasing pages from issues or printing smaller newspaper pages, like they’ve done in San Antonio’s paper. We like our paper. And people love computer solutions that just work, all the time, like that dial tone on the land-line phones.

   Newspapers will leave us someday, but journalism will drive information as long as logic skills spark computing solutions. You can add all the Twitter follows, RSS feeds and cloud computing you want to your product. If you have nothing unique to offer, it won’t do the work of news. If the report doesn’t match the data, it might as well be a story. Imagination is served by youth, but going beyond data, to information, to knowledge, and finally arriving at wisdom — that demands a patient, print-like pace for information systems.

    I feel proud to have survived in my craft long enough to see the negatives and plates of newspapers revered in State of Play, to say “I once heard presses in the back room creating a paper with my story on the front page.” The pride feels fine, but we must use our experience to embrace what’s improved even while we practice the fundamentals.

   Your community is in a state of play this year and all through the next. Keep looking for those truths that the powers that be will try to avoid. Alternatives, be they transition timelines or bedrock solutions, offer essential value in challenging times.

3000s to depart Longs after long life

Longs Drug, the Western US drug store chain which once ran as many as 450 HP 3000s in the world's biggest 3000 network, will be turning off its last system this fall. The migration away from the 3000 began nearly a decade ago when the retail chain started moving a everyday applications onto HP-UX. The systems were located in every store, housed in an enclosure so foolproof only a slot for backup tapes was needed for access. Now HP 3000 manager Jim Alexander reports the last machine will be switched off sometime in October.

Longs was such a large HP 3000 customer that the company had its own dedicated HP 3000 rep.The company's history with the platform goes back so far that its IT manager Bill Gates chaired the HP 3000 Users Group Planning Committee -- in 1975. The company's dedication to volunteer support for the 3000 community has been continued through the 1990s and this decade by Donna Garverick, who left Longs last year to join the support staff of Allegro Consultants. Garverick, who remarried and became Donna Hoffmeister while she was volunteering for OpenMPE, is best known for Internet messages typed in lowercase only, because of her dedication (at Longs) to Posix under MPE.

Alexander, who's losing his Longs job next month, said in a weekend posting that a third-party firm will be administering the last Longs HP 3000 until this fall. He added that system will be in familiar hands.

Longs operated only a handful of HP 3000s by the time HP 3000 migration became a common task for the community. But the company was thick with users of the 3000 mail system DeskManager through the 1990s, and also broke ground with virtual array use, clustering, performance thresholds and so much more. Alexander outlined the end-game for the system's departure from a drugstore chain acquired by CVS.

I will be laid off on July 10th after 11 years with Longs.  A well known company will be engaged to provide operations and administrative support ..The machines will be happy because in all likelihood, familiar fingers will be pressing the keys to do administrative tasks on these boxes, but I will let the audience figure out who that lower case loving person would be.  ;-)

I am transporting one of the remaining HP3000 servers for Longs / CVS to the pharmacy distribution warehouse in Ontario, California this weekend.  It will continue to operate for about four more months and then be shut down for good.  It will be the test and development server to the production box that has been in place for years. 

After about 30 years of HP3000s being at Longs drugs, with a high water mark of about 450 HP3000s, there will be no more HP3000 for Longs Drug Stores. Long live the HP3000.

Support Group partners with Blue Line for solutions

Offerings from the Support Group inc. (tSGI) gained scope and depth recently, when the HP 3000 outsourcing and support company announced a partnership with Blue Line Services. The companies, which are both headquartered in Texas, will share marketing and resources for on-site and support center operations.

"We have partnered our expert services to bring complete end-to-end coverage to the HP 3000 community," said tSGi Account Manager and Business Systems consultant Donnie Poston. "With our combined services you can now have HP 3000 hardware, software and MPE operations support and management under one roof."

Poston said the companies started talks about working together early this year, when engagements with HP 3000 customers gave the firms some common group. They plan to share customer lists and use each other's support teams to back up one another's client lists. Marketing and sales support are also on the combined efforts list.

The new partners also offer support, system sales and solutions for other HP systems. As an example, Blue Line is putting HP's LeftHand SAN storage solution into the mix of options for enterprise IT customers. LeftHand can be purchased from many PC-based suppliers, but resellers with HP 3000 background are fewer in number.

Even though tSGi is best known for supporting and implementing ERP applications, the company offers independent support outside that sector. "we have HP 3000/MPE accounts that do not use MANMAN," said Poston. "We manage the HP 3000 and OS for them.  They either have homegrown apps, or have folks that manage the ERP/MRP type apps onsite."

tSGi announced that it is offering discount support rates for existing and new customers who sign a 2 year support contract.

IBM takes a swing at 9000 migration

HP employees who once attempted to sell HP 3000s now promote HP's Unix servers as a mainframe replacement. But talking heads in the Big Blue community are pushing back in the other direction, using a hardware transition as an example of migration.

Over at Mainframe Executive, an article by analyst Joe Clabby details an IBM mainframe capture of an HP-UX installation. The software and IT services company KMD decided to leave move its software off an HP 9000, Clabby's article says, because HP left the company no choice but to migrate to HP's Itanium Unix servers.

The story is puzzling in its tone of accomplishment as well as sketchy on the details. The software company already operated an IBM z Series mainframe for many years. They decided to move the HP 9000 apps, including some software services business, to an in-house server. There's not nearly as much skin in the game when an IT director consolidates onto an in-house platform. The only risk is whether your flavor of Unix can be moved onto another variation, in KMD's case Linux on a mainframe partition.

We don't know what database powered the HP 9000 apps and services, a significant missing fact for a case study. But that's not surprising when reading Clabby's reports. Early in this decade he was moderating an HP Management Roundtable for the Interex user group. Then he was advising a company to adopt Itanium. Two-plus years ago he began to tout IBM products on the vendor's Web site. Has he been learning, adapting, or just finding another nail to fit the Big Blue hammer? Tossing around the word "migration" even has him mentioning the HP 3000.

There is a migration underway for HP-UX customers. If they want newer hardware from HP, they need to purchase Integrity servers, those powered by the Itanium chips that Clabby first supported and now derides. HP has stopped selling the HP 9000 servers which use PA-RISC chips. That business is just as dead as HP's 3000 sales. The difference? HP has no alternative for new hardware that runs MPE/iX from the 3000 world.

The HP 9000 customers have a path of migration, if you choose to call this shift by that name. HP's done all it can do to make the Itanium architecture a match for HP-UX apps. Our reports from customers show that the major work in moving to Itanium from PA-RISC involves home-grown code. There's a lot of that at KMD, according to the story, but customers who've migrated say they don't see a difference between the server architectures. Except that Itanium gallops like a racehorse compared to the pony-trot of PA-RISC.

Clabby's article appeared in an IBM Mainframe Web site/newsletter, so the hammer he swings at HP probably fits the Big Blue nails nicely. But if this is an exemplary success story for adopting mainframes, then replacing Unix servers with them looks like an idea that's not tacked down completely. Tossing the HP 3000 migrations in with HP 9000 moves is misleading at best. While HP has halted sales of both computers, the 9000 customers have options and HP's swelling discounts in a bad economy to keep them in the fold. The 3000 customers have the same discounts, but a whole other world of migration services and software to pay for.

Will PCI standards kick 3000s out of service?

The answer to the question is being researched by HP 3000 customers today. Those who accept credit cards for payments, and process more than 20,000 Visa sales a year, are preparing for new standards from merchant banks to meet the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS).

All major credit card brands collectively adopted PCI DSS in 2006 as the requirement for organizations that process, store or transmit payment cardholder data. Ecometry's HP 3000 customers know their e-commerce software vendor will not be certifying HP 3000s for the 2010 standard. But it appears that Ecometry's owner Escalate isn't qualified to certify PCI compliance anyway.

The standard is broader than just software design, covering practices and processes as fundamental as whether and how to store cardholder data. (Don't, unless you must; encrypted plenty if you do.) Escalate wants to convert every Ecometry site to the Unix/Windows versions of the app, which Escalate will be glad to assure as PCI DSS compliant.

But security vendor Paul Taffel, who's just rolled out new features in IDent/3000, says Ecometry is far from the only place to have compliant standards implemented. A Qualified Security Assessor (QSA) can perform an audit to verify compliance — so 3000 sites can continue to process credit card transactions. Or so it appears. Merchant banks will decide.

The PCI Web site and associated white papers include a vast, 28-page listing of QSA providers. A PCI council certifies these providers. QSA is conferred by the PCI Security Standards Council to individuals who meet specific information security education requirements and have taken the appropriate training from the PCI Security Standards Council. They must also be employed by an Approved PCI Security and Auditing Firm. These assessors will be performing PCI compliance audits relating to the protection of cardholder data.

Third party solutions are available to get 3000 sites better credit card security. "The combination of Fluent Edge’s credit card encryption with IDent’s other features, and Vesoft’s Logon security, together provide a robust set of features that certainly fulfill the spirit of the PCI requirements," Taffel says.

The simple answer, for the Ecometry sites who rely completely on Escalate services, would be yes: HP 3000s won't pass the PCI DSS. But any Ecometry site which plans to remain on the HP 3000 after 2010 will be using a third-party solution anyway, since the Ecometry app loses support in that year. These Ecometry customers are leaving their vendor behind to continue to use an application which does the job without many problems. That no-fuss model is what made the 3000 an elegant and efficient business choice to begin with.