Does IA-64's future fail on emulation ability?

It's a good question to ask when a customer is considering where to migrate 3000 applications. Common sense advice from migration service suppliers says "It's all about the apps," meaning that target choices are determined by which applications a migrator must choose. But often in the 3000 marketplace, the applications remain the same during a migration, as companies execute a lift-and-shift move of code.

When the app remains the same, then choosing via architecture and environment is the fork in the road away from the 3000. Towards the x86/Xeon world of Windows, or into the land of Unix and HP's IA-64 Itanium designs? (HP-UX and IA-64 are a matched set of solutions, since Itanium is the only host for HP's Unix.) An analyst said recently that only three architectures will survive the consolidation of solutions, and Itanium isn't one of them. Joe Clabby has promoted IBM's solutions before his latest report, which claims the z architecture of IBM mainframes and IBM's POWER architecture will be survivors, along with Xeon.

But the reasons Clabby dismisses any survival for Itanium don't fit the technical view of one of the 3000 community's best IA-64 experts. Gavin Scott, a VP at support and development house Allegro Consultants, says that Clabby's wrong about x86 emulation being the fatal flaw in the Itanium fabric.

Clabby, who once advised his clients that Itanium was a good investment of development dollars, now faces away from HP, if not Intel. x86 compatibility is so important that it keeps IT planners away because their 32-bit apps aren't welcome on Itanium.

“From a dropped features perspective," Clabby said, "one of the most important features dropped in Itanium design was the chip’s ability to handle 32-bit computing. During the course of its development, 32-bit  emulation mode was removed from the Itanium feature set, making it impossible for IT buyers to run their existing 32-bit applications on the Itanium 64-bit processor.”

Scott says 32 bits are a small matter in choosing IA-64, which he calls by its HP/Intel name, Itanium Processor Family.

In reality, virtually nobody cares about running x86 on IPF. The only possible users would be Linux, where software is typically portable and recompiled anyway, so Linux users probably don’t see it as a huge issue either way, and a Microsoft Windows Server Ludicrous IPF Version user who wants to run old programs along with Oracle or SQL Server or whatever other limited excuse there is for the existence of Windows for IPF. I would think that the software emulation probably got added to Windows too, making it a non-issue.

I suspect the Intel software translation/emulation is maybe even better than the old native hardware feature was.

The first few implementations of Itanium ran IA-32 (standard x86) code natively in the hardware, Scott explained, the dropped the feature in preference of "a software translation/emulation module that I believe Intel developed and made available for use with Linux, so just as Aries makes PA-RISC work, the Intel software lets you run 32-bit x86 code whether or not your IPF chip has the old native x86 support or not."

Scott is referring to the Aries emulator in HP-UX, software which permits apps written for PA-RISC to operate on an Itanium processor. HP says it has no plans to drop Aries support in HP-UX, something that app developers who don't want to rewrite HP-UX apps for native Itanium count upon. But serious computing gets re-coded for new architectures, not emulated, Scott says.

"Generally people seem to find that for important, CPU-intense programs, Aries is not fast enough," he said, "and they really need to recompile into native code."

There are better reasons that ermulation to show why Itanium choices cut across the tide of movement toward Intel Xeon solutions. The architecture hasn't developed a large critical mass of customers compared to what HP calls its Industry Standard Servers. That lack of mass makes development choices harder to fund at Intel as well as within HP -- although Hewlett-Packard shows a great deal more faith in Itanium's capabilities.

The truth is that every solution has a migration in its future. But if the major effort of moving away is years away, a company can do well with a niche solution if the architecuture is elegant, efficient and stable. That's what's given the 3000 such an afterlife, a design beyond HP's plans for the system's demise.

Securing 3000 FTP: Clients yes, servers no

When long-time 3000 customer Eveready Insurance asked if Secure FTP (SFTP) is available for the server, the short answer was yes. And no.

A client version of the software to secure file transfers has been available for the 3000 for some time. What the 3000 lacks for now is a secure FTP server module. This means that the HP 3000 must initiate each secure file transfer process.

HP's response center engineer Cathlene McRae has pointed customers to a 2008 HP white paper on the subject of securing 3000 file transfers, a document which is honest about how much MPE's FTP supports industry standards. McRae admitted that MPE/iX doesn't provide a version of SFTP in addition to the 3000's regular FTP/iX. Once the invent3k public access development server accounts are restored for the community -- a project OpenMPE has been working on since September -- a true SFTP server module might proceed toward a release. A volunteer for that project would have to step up, too.

HP's white paper reports that it created a script called crypt that can secure 3000 transfers. The good news is that even though HP has closed down its Jazz server, crypt is still available to the community. Speedware is hosting crypt (a tarball that can be downloaded) as part of its collection of Jazz programs.

HP's paper says in part:

HP has designed a script which will allow FTP/iX users to transfer files securely from MPE/iX to remote systems running HP-UX, Linux, MPE/iX etc. The script provides an option to encrypt files prior to the transfer. Depending on this “encrypt” option and a few other considerations, the file will be encrypted using the POSIX CRYPT utility, before it is transferred via FTP/iX.

Brian Edminster of Applied Technologies has explained the differences between full SFTP support and the state of secure transfers using MPE/iX 7.5. In a report from earlier this year, Edminster said "while files can be put to or retrived from other systems, since only the SFTP client is available, the 3000 must originate the transaction. This can make for some process redesigns if your existing applications are used to your 3000 being the ‘server’."

That SFTP server module -- the element that prevents 3000 managers from saying the system supports SFTP -- is in a double limbo this month. A first pass at creating a port of OpenSSH for MPE/iX is included in the invent3k files of Ken Hirsch. But invent3k, like the Contributed Software Library and the Jazz programs, is still being set up by OpenMPE. Speedware and Client Systems haven't signed up to host invent3k. OpenMPE's mission remains keeping the 3000 up to date, once these porting projects become available to the community once again.

Snapshots form pictures for 3000 repositories

Official documentation for the HP 3000 has a lifespan, a period of time that's not measured like a book's bindings or any crumbling foundation of a library. Manuals and documents about how to operate a 3000 thrive upon the interest and care from the community. Speedware said at the latest e3000 Community Meet that it wants to be a repository for such 3000 knowledge.

Chris Koppe, the company's marketing director who is also the 2010 Connect user group president, reported that Speedware took snapshots of the documentation that was removed from the HP's Web servers last December. "If you're missing anything that was in HTML, some see us," he said at the Meet. Documents which used to be available in either HTML or PDF formats now only appear as PDFs. Koppe said that while Speedware still can't host official 3000 documentation, HP advised them to "take a snapshot of all of it last year -- early, just in case."

HP spread that advice around the user community about this time last year, when it had begun to issue its final communications with the community. The vendor's migration effort may be erasing some edges of HP's picture of documentation, so outside respositories are important to preserve 3000 practices. "As part of the migration," said Eloquence database creator Michael Marxmeier at the Meet, "some documents might just vanish, and it's difficult for a large organization to restore them."

HP gave customers that advice to capture any needed documents last year, then took its Jazz server offline for good to remove scores of documents and programs. Early this year the vendor struck deals with several companies to host white papers, training materials and free utility software. The 3000 system and software documentation was also a part of those deals, but it was licensed with a caveat. Outside companies can't offer these docs until HP stops serving them.

That kind of change can happen overnight, but at the moment HP has promised that it will remain the repository of 3000 documentation until 2015. The vendor's support business is scheduled to end five years earlier -- a point in time when the more repositories exist, the better coverage for the community.

Chris Bartram, the founder of the 3000's Technical Wiki and host of dozens of public utility programs at 3k.com, said he believes HP's long timelines for exiting 3000 services are part of a strategy. OpenMPE, which also wants to be known as the 3000's repository, endured years of delays and HP deliberations about the vendor's plans to hand off the stewardship of 3000 intelligence.

I wished OpenMPE good luck when they set off so many years ago, but I firmly believe that some at HP knew it was probably in their best interest to drag things on long enough -- without actually saying no and pissing people off -- so by the time anything was handed over, there would be so little demand left that HP could be sure they had milked all the "conversions" (and related new hardware purchases) they could. I guess it's getting close to that point -- so I'm not sure if I'm happy for OpenMPE, or sad.

The challenge in preparing for a far-off transfer of information like manuals, or moving support contracts by the end of 2010, is that any new resources must ramp up and then wait for their turn as stewards. Speedware, which contracted for hosting of 3000 manuals, must keep them archived and ready for whatever day HP decides manuals will not be online at HP anymore. "The idea here is to make sure that nothing gets lost over time," Koppe said, "so it has a home somewhere."

Whether it's Speedware, with its contracts, resources and HP data in hand, or OpenMPE -- trying to get its HP docs cleaned up to host on a new Jazz/Invent3k server -- any alliance of 3000 community members won't be earning much from doing this repository work. The only real profits come from showing love for the beloved server still at the heart of so many careers and companies.

"We're not really making any money in this market anymore," said Bartram, who sold 3000 e-mail application software during the 1990s and still supports it. "So it's still more of a labor of love -- or love lost."

HP Q4 results show business servers stalled

Hewlett-Packard reported its fiscal year and fourth quarter results late Monday, results that drew good news from services business, PC and printer sales, and little else. While the headline news showed an increase in Q4 profits over the same 2008 quarter, HP achieved its rise on cost cutting. Its total sales dropped 8 percent versus the prior fourth quarter and 3 percent for all of fiscal 2009.

That's a $114 billion year in sales, with HP reporting a total profit of $10.1 billion. The 2008 numbers hold the records for both categories -- and that was a fiscal year where EDS didn't contribute for two of HP's four quarters. Enterprise Server sales, part of the ESS group in the chart below, were off during 2009 by about $4 billion.

The numbers were brightest in the services sector which contributed most to 2009 sales. Once HP added EDS to its portfolio of acquired companies, the unit delivered both profits and sales that rose throughout the year. Services has kicked in upwards of $1 billion per quarter in 2009 profits, becoming the new printer group of HP's financial desires. The EDS unit came close to topping HP's PC business in sales, all while earning three times as much profit. Services now represent almost 38 percent of all HP profits.

PCs sat at the center of analyst questions in the briefing held after the US markets closed. HP is taking market share from Dell, but sales revolve around the least expensive products in the Personal Systems Group lineup. Wall Street and investment experts didn't ask about the Enterprise Storage and Server unit or the group's Business Critical Servers division. ESS generated more profits than in Q3, but its $481 million in earnings was 30 percent below the same 2008 quarter.

The latest numbers for the BCS products, such as the Integrity HP-UX server line and the ProLiant Windows servers, wouldn't inspire confidence in prospects for a renewal of former's sales growth.

The HP-specific enterprise servers which make up the Integrity line saw a drop in year over year sales of 33 percent. Even the arrival of blade server options couldn't show a rise, with sales off 8 percent.

The results in enterprise servers looked like a situation where the small businesses led HP to better profitability while the HP-UX options for midrange and large companies brought up the rear. HP's CFO Cathy Lesjak had to point to incremental growth to assert improving conditions for the company's server operations. Increasing sales volumes for Industry Standard Servers (ISS) that run Windows drove up operating margins for ESS, she said.

"Although each business unit in Business Critical Systems was down year on year, each grew sequentially," Lesjak said. "Business Critical Systems and Storage improved 6 and 11 percent, respectively." Sequential comparisons are used to show overall sales trends, but business booked during a Q3 does not compare well with sales opportunities much deeper into customers' calendar year.

The newest G6 platforms in ISS, delivered during the summer, contributed to those Windows servers' 15 percent sales rise between a quarter ending July 31 and the one ended October 31. HP pre-announced these servers in the middle of Q3, tamping down demand for existing server sales that would then rebound when the new servers became available.

"With its compelling value proposition, we are seeing rapid adoption of this [G6 ProLiant] platform, with approximately 50 percent of ISS sales now coming from G6," Lesjak said.

HP made forecasts for its 2010 business, at least in the near term. It expects a quarter to start fiscal 2010 of about the same sales as the just ended quarter. Earnings will drop sequentially, HP predicts, while the full fiscal year should show sales of about $118 billion.

HP to roll out Q4 results this afternoon

HP's stock flirts with $50 a share today, as the company is set to release full details on its 2009 fiscal year and forecasts for business during 2010. The company will take questions from Wall Street analysts today in a Webcast which starts at 5 PM EST, after the US markets close. (Follow the link at the right, in our Twitter Updates, to find the Webcast page for HP's report.)

The financial condition and strategies of the world's biggest computer and services provider should matter to HP 3000 owners who are migrating. Business plan changes prompted HP to leave the 3000 market when the company decided revenue growth was not great enough to continue 3000 investments. Future surprises about support for non-standard environments could be impacted by financials.

HP took some of the surprise out of today's Q4 results by pre-announcing its financials on Nov. 11. HP said it earned 99 cents a share on revenue of $30.8 billion for the period, compared with a profit of 84 cents a share on $33.5 billion sales during the same period a year ago. HP trotted out those results along with news that it is buying the No. 2 networking equipment provider 3Com Corp for $2.7 billion.

But today's full report will include data on the performance of HP's enterprise server operations. The unit which develops and sells the Integrity systems that run HP-UX, as well as Windows ProLiant servers, is far from the spotlight for financial mavens. Performance of HP's PC business, the company's printer and imaging group, and the rise of the high-profit services unit are much higher on HP's hit parade.

HP's 3000 legacy includes A, N-Class details

In our recent report on the seventh anniversary of HP's 3000 exit notice, we referred to a shining moment for the community. We captured the first-ever introduction of A-Class and N-Class HP 3000s on February 7, 2001. Although HP introduced its final generation of 3000s over and over for the next six months, that spring morning showed off the new design in extensive detail.

Product Manager Dave Snow is introduced by General Manager Winston Prather at the e3000 Solutions Symposium in our video, waltzing down the meeting room's aisle with an A-Class server under his arm. He's borrowed one of the few that were testing-ready that day from HP's MPE/iX labs. In a separate movie of 5 minutes, Snow leads a tour of the advantages the new design still offers over the 9x9 and 99x 3000s. HP pulled the covers and cabinet doors off to show internal hardware design.

HP hasn't manufactured these N- and A-Class models for more than six years, but they remain popular among community members who need to upgrade 3000s. They were built to a standard of reliability and durability that gives the computers a longer lifespan than many business servers. It's not easy to find this video's level of configuration detail here in 2009, even while the servers continue to be bought and sold

Snow discusses the length of that 3000 lifespan as he starts his advantages tour. The term of useful service of an HP 3000 gave customers an advantage in the short term -- but some say that that same service level contributed to HP's departure from your community.

Snow points to a missing future to start his tour. During his introduction he notes that "we do have a future beyond today's A- and N-Class server, in large part because we have a lot to talk about today." At least at the moment of the computer's introduction, HP seems to be intent on driving forward its 3000 business with technology advances. It was about to start reaping the years of technical work sowed to bring a 28-year-old server into the most current business server design.

3000s didn't wear out or fall so far behind computing needs as soon as other HP solutions. Useful life could easily be 10 years, a rate of churn that didn't fit with HP's new business model during 2001.

Many of the improvements in this ultimate HP 3000 came at the MFIO and processor board level. The servers used networking and peripheral support that provided speed and value that the server never had before 2001. The advantage tour video was shown to a room of 100 developers, 3000 partners and customers. HP hadn't changed the 3000 this much since its PA-RISC rollouts of the late 1980s.

There were to be even more striking changes to a 3000 customer's solutions and future about nine months away from that 2001 morning. By some estimates, judging from the first customer ship dates, these servers had only six months to contribute to division revenues before HP pulled its 3000 plug. No one can be certain how they might have succeeded for a customer base running 3000s 8-10 years old, systems hungry for power and cooling and falling short of CPU needs.

But those same distinctions matter today, even after more than eight years, to community members who need an upgrade before they finish using their 3000s. HP will finish its 3000 business before commerce ends around the A- and N-Class. Waiting for all these years to acquire one delivers a massive discount by now, in addition to the technical advantages.

Living a Long Afterlife

Eight years ago this week, your community lay in a state of shock. Some vendors were not surprised that HP announced the end of its HP 3000 business, but an overwhelming majority of customers and suppliers found themselves caught off guard. The approach of the 3000's afterlife began on Nov. 14, 2001. Like the horizon, of course, the complete exit of 3000 customers has remained out in the distance.

HP continues to find itself surprised at the pace of migration. Alvina Nishimoto, one of the few HP employees left who can help out with 3000-specific issues of moving to HP's alternatives, said as much during the roundtable discussion of this fall's e3000 Community Meet.

It's very quiet on the 3000 front at HP, she explained. But when asked what the surprises have been during the Year No. 8 of the 3000 Transition, Nishimoto said the unexpected continues to surface.

"They're migrating late, which is kind of surprising,” she said. “We have 9x7 customers coming out of the woodwork,” a data point that would seem to suggest more than 1,000 customers continue to use a 3000, because the 9x7s were first shipped 15 years ago. That's been a busy 15 years, since more than half of it has comprised The Afterlife.

We don't let this anniversary pass without reminding our community that HP predicted its demise with astounding inaccuracy. At first 80 percent of you would be migrated off 3000s by 2004. Then came revisions that put 25 percent of the community on the server at 2006, two years later with a larger group. "Reports of my demise are greatly exaggerated," homesteaders quipped. HP didn't even have a term for the customers who would stay put, long-term or intermediate. We provided that homesteader title, which HP eventually started to use. It had to; the majority of its customers were not migrated three years out from the end of 2001.

But the reality is that a very large portion of the customer base of 2001 is now using other platforms.

There was always migration underway before The Afterlife began. HP 3000 customer attrition started in the early 1990s, and some in the community peg the highwater mark for customer base in the late 1980s. HP tried to grow back customers in the late '90s with long-overdue enhancements to networking and Internet features. But the very event which postponed migrations, Y2K, also worked to stall HP's drive toward faster and better-connected systems. What HP called the N-Class and A-Class servers only made their debut six months before the vendor pulled its 3000 plug into the future. HP promised these servers for the year 2000.

That lab-based delay came out of unit managed by Winston Prather while the work started in the late 1990s. The same HP employee moved into the general manager post for the 3000 division, shaping the headcount, as the labs were forced to extend the deadline to a year beyond division estimates. It's little wonder why HP 3000 sales came to a standstill after Y2K. Customers were waiting on a promised product better than those 9x7s. It was time to upgrade, but the new generation was overdue.

Once HP announced it would exit your community, those 9x7 owners couldn't justify buying N-Class and A-Class servers. So that glorious day in the spring of 2001 when Platform Product Manager Dave Snow marched down the aisle at the Solutions Symposium with the first A-Class server -- a marvel of reduced size with increased power and efficiency -- didn't arrive soon enough.

HP was doing its own migration to deliver the final generation of 3000s. The PCI peripherals bus, already running and selling HP 9000s for more than a year, proved to be a complex transfer to the 3000. Some have pointed at the differences between IO handing in Unix and MPE/iX to explain the delays. More likely culprits were two elements that were too numerous and too few. HP 3000s supported a wide array of peripherals, since the HP 3000 credo was "leave no customer behind."

At the same time the HP 3000 lab headcount was being squeezed too small to manage both Y2K repairs and tests to MPE/iX, as well as hardware development projects for the PCI servers. Add those elements during an era when HP's CEO was mandating revenue growth as a way to stick to the HP product line, and you get a formula which delivered a late upgrade, which stalled sales and kept the 3000 from growing. The same manager whose lab direction had to juggle two major projects got to pull the plug on the 3000. Winston Prather has always said he made the call to cull out the 3000. It might be one of the few times when a GM at HP erased his own division.

Prather engineered a safe landing for himself and some of the engineers and managers of the group. As for his customers, many were not so lucky. Having spent their careers polishing their HP 3000 expertise, system managers and programmers suddenly got motivated to learn technology on other platforms. They would compete for these jobs against younger and less-costly technologists. The lucky ones retooled themselves. Few community members can point at a career that didn't take a hit in November of 2001.

Companies like HP don't step away from 28-year-old businesses very often. Your community's contribution to HP's knowledge about ending business relationship is worthwhile for a vendor who will nurture in-house technologies. Except that HP doesn't appear to be in that kind of business anymore for computing, given developments like buying its competition in networking with an acquisition of 3com. One day the HP-UX customers will suffer a day like Nov. 14, and HP will be more prepared than it was eight years ago. The community of 3000 customers was always teaching HP something until the day the vendor pulled its plug. Learning how to estimate the pace and impact of churn and change -- those are HP's lessons that entitle you to help and accommodation from the creator of the 3000.

HP's history becomes a phenomenon

The company which created the HP 3000 is celebrating its 70th anniversary this year. Perhaps it's the coincidence of a zero-numbered commemoration, but history that relates to the 3000 seems to be in the air this week. Most of it represents snapshots of an era we'll never return to, and some community members are thankful for the departure. But what's been left behind could be much more valuable than histories and manuals.

Today Forbes has an early review of the first book by a retired HP executive, Chuck House, who knew and worked with the HP 3000 business. The HP Phenomenon earned praise from a reviewer who's written his own HP book, George Anders. But the reviewer of Phenomenon wrote a more upbeat take on HP's changes than House's clear-eyed memories. Anders wrote the Carly Fiorina saga Perfect Enough, a kinder view of the changes that CEO inflicted on the HP which House remembers.

House still reveres the HP of the Sixties through the 1980s, just like the 3000 community venerates the MPE Software Pocket Guides of the 1970s and '80s. A current thread on the 3000 newsgroup has floated into memory lane about that era of the 3000. Like the guide itself -- and the HP computer management which House admires in his book -- the world has changed enough to make its best days appear to be behind it.

There's no doubt that the pocket guides are a token of the past. I was lucky to receive one that had been in the trenches, obviously well used and well-loved. Alfredo Rego passed on his MPE III guide once the OS started to move out of MPE V territory. But like the community members who now recall how vital a tool the book once was, Alfredo wrote a note in his guide's cover in 1987.

This little MPE III pocket guide is as valid today as it was in 1978. As a matter of fact, I used this guide today to change THE bit that made Adager run on the HP3000 Series 930.

As that summer of 1987 wrapped up, the Series 930 was the test-pilot aircraft of the overdue PA-RISC fleet. Only a handful were ever shipped, and HP replaced every one for free with the more capable Series 950.

By the time my MPE III guide was in heavy use, the community had another wizard, this one a wunderkind revered by veterans and novices alike. Eugene Volokh co-created the MPEX utility along with his dad Vladimir. House was on the scene at HP in those times. House was also part of the HP 3000 history seminar from last summer. Steve Cooper, who founded Allegro Consultants with Stan Sieler in that era, chronicled the Eugene legend in this video from the meeting.

The story includes a note from Sieler about the novelty of the concept of a super-MPE with wildcarding capability. One engineer in the 3000 group, Walt McCullough, engineered a similar concept. But HP wasn't focused in 1980 on incremental technology that could become so vital as MPEX, Sieler explains

House was working on his book during the summer of that seminar; the book is only available today through Stanford University Press, and the Amazon UK Web site. But there are excerpts from the book available through House's blog. In one blog entry, he takes a break from his memoirs of the Bill & Dave HP era to note how much change has occurred in the boardroom of the modern HP.

In an entry titled Whither HP Now? House explains why he believes HP has made a habit of under-investing in creating technology.

HP, after spending 9% of revenues for 60 years, almost like clockwork, cut that to 6% under [CEO] Lew Platt's regime, and from the midpoint of Carly's time until now, it has been reduced by a cool 0.5% per year, until now it is only 3% of revenues, one-half of IBM's investments in its future. To cut R&D by two-thirds, to rework HP Labs to the point of only pursuing work that the divisions will market or that universities will support (huh, say that again?), is to sell out the future. Period.

One might confidently predict that the constant wellspring of "renewal" -- so long the hallmark of HP -- is running dry. The acquisitions had better work.

There is an HP which still lives at many HP 3000-using companies: the vendor who will supply replacement systems and environments as migration targets. Two paths can be followed: one toward technology in which HP continues to invest, HP-UX. The other path is away from software innovation and toward standards, following Windows or Linux advances. An HP which couldn't imagine why they'd need a Pocket Guide for any product will exist in the future. But looking to the past won't clear the crystal ball to reveal when that "day of the dry well" arrives for HP. A customer who invests in HP's future needs to see smaller, more nimble tech companies continue to join and create the Hewlett-Packard phenomenon.

For the customer who's always wondered what the inside of the HP Garage looks like, the workplace of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard is on display over the Web. A video tour, led by HP archivist Anna Mancini, is online -- so you can see the head of that wellspring. At what the industry calls the Birthplace of Silicon valley, the garage restored by HP shows the era of HP's phenomenon when R&D was all the company could offer.

Itanium: Failing HP-UX futures, or more?

We take it on faith today that Intel produces most of the world's popular processors. Even Apple, once a Motorola and IBM POWER stronghold, now uses Intel chips in Macs. But the HP 3000 never got a real chance at having Intel Inside. Now that 3000 emulators are in the works and testing soon, it looks like skipping over Intel's Itanium might be a good thing for MPE/iX users.

This might come as heresy to the 3000 advocates who lobbied HP long and hard for a shot at 64-bit processing, the Valhalla of the journey via Itanium. But look at what HP-UX customers got for their waiting -- including the 3000 sites that migrated sooner than later -- and you can wonder if the delays were worth it. The 3000, and MPE/iX apps, are now more likely to find a future on an mainstream Intel chip.

This matters now, in the gray time of HP's Unix system migration. PA-RISC is old tech, but it's running a large share of the migrated 3000 sites. The Itanium failure to dominate relegated HP-UX to a niche market, a place HP couldn't imagine setting up shop. The 3000 was supposed to be the small market, even if HP didn't say so while Itanium was so new it was called Merced.

Since Hewlett-Packard plowed its engineering into Itanium, HP's Unix customers cannot host their applications on a standard computer, something HP sells very well (think ProLiants, and Linux or Windows). These Industry Standard Servers, as HP calls them, are so strong that HP is thinking of folding its printer business into a combined PC-printer organization. This would offer little help to HP-UX customers. The merger is supposed to jump-start HP's printer sales.

Back in the 90s, HP trumpeted vast plans for the chip that now represents the Only Home for HP's Unix. Then the market had its say. One PC columnist, whose last name is the same as a failed keyboard layout, asserts that Itanium hobbled more than HP-UX options, since it failed to live up to its promise. John Dvorak says the chip killed the computer industry.

Now Dvorak has been a splashy computer writer for a long time, which can boost a fella's readership nicely. (It helps to be published by PC Magazine, which recently dropped printing altogether to retreat to the Web.) Dvorak told his version of Itanium history this year as a cautionary tale. He reminded us that promises of world domination by any technology should be viewed as fables until the future arrives.

His column does a good job of summarizing the hubris of Itanium, nee-Merced-nee-Tahoe, a flight plan HP cooked up in its top-notch Labs but had to take on Intel as a co-pilot in order to fly. The flight of Itanium was as anticipated as any Spruce Goose test run. HP told all of its customers to expect all other chip architectures to evaporate. Who could take on the industry clout of Intel and the brainpower of HP's Very Long Instruction Word designs? And so by degrees we lost the Alpha, the SPARC, and more. Computers made by Dell, IBM and Sun would be powered with chips created by HP and Intel.

I've covered Itanium since these two companies were calling their joint project Tahoe in 1994, then naming the chip architecture Merced in '95. By '96, the 3000 community was eager to learn what Hewlett-Packard would decide about including the HP 3000 in the world domination party. Early in '97, the 3000 customers were told, in a special TV teleconference, that they weren't invited to the 64-bit party.

PA-RISC, said HP in 1997, provided plenty of processor for the 3000s future. As it turned out, HP sold PA-RISC to all of its MPE and Unix customers for another 6-11 years. We wrote in 1997:

[HP] indicates a long lifespan for the 64-bit processor that now powers the 3000. Remember, Merced still isn't a tested solution anywhere, and few expect it to be available before 1999 in HP's processors. What's more, HP still hasn't shipped PA-8200 chips in either HP 9000 or HP 3000 systems. There's a lot of PA-RISC lifetime still left to live.

Only in 2007 did the number of HP-UX servers sold for Itanium/Integrity pass the sales of PA-RISC computers. HP stopped selling PA-RISC last year, 14 years after it crowed about Itanium ruling the marketplace.

Dvorak says that the high-water mark of the computer industry was 2000, and he adds that Itanium pulled the business into the basement in the years since then. It doesn't look like he's accounting for the Y2K swell that put your community at its crest. But he's right about one thing: The chip that hosts the future of HP-UX, the one that will give those users processor headroom for years to come, never came close to the $38 billion it was supposed to earn way back in 2001.

HP and Intel were late, over and over, in delivering something to beat PA-RISC. Hewlett-Packard was hoping for a repeat of the miracle of MPE. HP rolled out PA-RISC in 1987 and the 3000 apps written for 16-bit CISC processors ran in Emulation Mode on the new chips. That's why an emulator for the 3000 hardware will have traction and generate sales for a company that makes it available. Emulators have a good track record with 3000 enterprise customers.

What better not happen: A series of big promises and Itanium-like delays for these hardware emulators. That's why nobody, not Stromasys or Strobe Data or anybody, is promising when the emulator solution will be ready. It's worse to miss a milestone than to release no schedule. People budget for products months and years in advance. Changing your mind is often expensive, and IT expenses remain on many chopping blocks.

Itanium has carved a niche for some apps, so it's not an utter failure. It provides the fastest engine for HP-UX, although there's no chip even racing in second place. No amount of cheery industry measurements can pull the only current HP-UX processor into the mainstream market. Such a market is important to a future without costly changes. HP 3000 owners have learned that business practice from Hewlett-Packard. Sales and market share make at difference at HP. Perhaps any project to emulate PA-RISC on industry standard Intel chips will have an even bigger set of customers: HP-UX sites looking for a longer future for their PA-RISC investments.

HP shifts location of manuals

HP support engineer Cathlene McRae, who attended this week's e3000 Community Meet, reports that the HP 3000 and MPE/iX manuals have moved from the docs.hp.com location on HP's Web site. She said the new link is www.hp.com/bizsupport, a new HP Business Support Center Web site.

The HP 3000 manuals are among the first wave of documents to move off the old Web address, according to an HP notice.

The migration is being conducted in stages over the next year and the MPE/iX content has been migrated as part of the first phase. You will see a  redirection link under the MPE/iX section of the docs.hp.com homepage. It will take you to the landing page for the MPE/iX docs on the Business Support Center.

If you're plugging in a revised Web address for docs.hp.com for the 3000, it's www.hp.com/go/e3000-docs

HP has reorganized and standardized the presentation of the manuals for the 6.x and 7.x versions of the 3000's software and subsystems. The documentation is now available only in PDF documents; HTML versions existed on the HP site in the past.

McRae pointed to an HP document that explains, "To achieve a look and feel similar to docs.hp.com, all the manuals will be organized by categories within each group and in alphabetical order." Documentation for HP Linux systems, OpenVMS, and Tru64 Unix has also been moved in the first phase.

The 3000's documentation has been licensed to Client Systems and Speedware for re-hosting, but Speedware's Chris Koppe said during the Community Meet that HP won't permit these partners to host the manuals until HP clears the material from embargo. HP confirmed at the meeting that it will host the documentation through 2015. HP recommends that customers download patches and documents from the HP site for themselves before Dec. 31 of that year.

McRae also posted links to other HP documents which answer some questions posed during the Community Meet:

• An October 2008 communique on post 2010 beta test patch and manual availability, Invent3k plans and Right to Use license policies.
• The final January 2009 communique covering source code license initiatives, emulator availability and guidelines on receiving MPE/iX and subsystem media.
• The one-page FAQ from January 2009 about HP's 3000 "platform emulator" licensing policies.

HP celebrates '84 alliance with Canon

Even while we're exploring the 3000 community circa 1984, HP looked back at that year in a press conference today to announce new printer ventures with Canon. When the 3000 "Mighty Mouse" systems were rolled out in 1984 -- the first office-ready minicomputer for HP -- another Hewlett-Packard breakthrough surfaced that year: The HP LaserJet, powered by print engines built by Canon.

HP and Canon have become more competitors than allies in the 25 years since that rosy honeymoon. But today HP announced it will sell Canon printers to HP enterprise customers. HP held a press conference today and issued a press release on creating the sales alliance along with a Managed Enterpise Solutions unit inside its printer/camera business group.

That IPG unit at HP looked less healthy than in prior years when the Q3 numbers for FY 2009 were reported last month. HP wants to leverage its presence inside enterprise computing to sell computers, a chestnut of a strategy. If you're an enterprise-grade customer, expect more HP offers about managing your printer needs. At the heart of the business is that so-rich ink and supplies commerce, of course.

HP retires docs link while experts retire

A computer system like the HP 3000 has been changing for the past eight years, even though the vendor is tugging at its plug through this decade. HP resources are edging out of the community's picture, even while the experts running systems in companies are retiring themselves.

One link customers will need is a Web connection to HP's 3000 documentation. Once printed in countless reams of bound paper, the knowledge is stored online. The location of the links has gotten more elusive. The most comprehensive start point recently edged off the docs.hp.com main page. This connection to HP manuals for supported products and HP engineer white papers is now at docs.hp.com/en/mpeixall.html

One example of the latter retirement is Greg Bell, a developer/analyst who's leaving a 37-year IT career this month at International Paper. Bell works at the Savannah, Ga. plant, where 3000s have been working since the Series III systems of the 1970s. Even as he exits this month, a pair of 3000s continue to work for this major corporation. There's no migration plan for two key applications there; new apps will move in, or the old ones will be mothballed.

Currently we have one Series 957 in Savannah running our last legacy applications, and one at our Prattville, Alabama mill doing the same. No migration to any other platform is planned -- the applications will be retired or replaced. I and another IT person here in Savannah provide support for the one system here and assist with the system in Prattville.

Bell says the 3000s have been static at International Paper over those past eight years, and that one at Savannah needs little more than a shutdown and reboot once in awhile. HP's exits from development and support have represented changes to the community, but not at this company.

With the exception of having to replace various parts -- which we do ourselves with third-party vendors providing those we’ve run out of from scavenging pieces from the other HP 3000s -- and the standard user setups/deletes, we have not done anything as far as the OS is concerned. We shut it down and reboot it every now and then to clean it up, but otherwise it just sits there and does its thing.

Bell has been at International Paper since the year the 3000 was first introduced. In 1972 the company was an IBM shop, but the 3000 made its footprints in the 80s and 90s running International Paper's financials. "We worked our way up from the Series IIIs to the 957/987 models. At our high point we had seven HP 3000s running all of our financial applications, and DEC servers running the production applications."

Working in IT long enough to call Digital "DEC" gives a hint at the scope of Bell's career. He's moving away to more personal projects after more than three decades that included midnight-oil challenges he met on the 3000s. "I wish I could say I will miss those 8-12 hour system upgrades in the middle of the night, but I think I can "migrate" to something more challenging, like my ever-expanding honey-do list."

The departure of experts like Bell opens opportunity for third parties to serve homesteaders. But knowledge drain has been on the community's list of issues for more than six years. That HP documents link includes a white paper from Mark Bixby, a former 3000 engineer who's now part of the development team at K-12 app company QSS. Bixby's April, 2003 paper, Is Your e3000 Environment Secure? still brims with valuable expertise. Even though the homesteading advice was written before HP stopped selling 3000s, the deck of more than 100 PowerPoint slides is full of good practices. Near the end, Bixby said that retiring expertise could pose security questions.

"Employees with MPE OS and local application skills may leave to seek a different career path," he wrote. "Will the employees who are left have sufficient skills to ensure good MPE and application security? Make sure critical knowledge is written down somewhere."

HP is still hosting the MPE knowledge on its servers, and the vendor is licensing the content to third parties. Unless a retirement path like the one Bell describes is the plan for apps at homesteading sites, you should marshal the critical, tribal knowledge of your apps as part of a sustainability practice.

Fiorina flips hat toward Senate rack

Align these three compass plot points, if you can, all announced within one week:

1. HP announces its toughest quarter in five years
2. Former CEO Carly Fiorina announces an exploration of a run for US Senate
3. Sentencing is delayed on the '06 HP phone spying case

The HP 3000 can provide a path across all three. Migrations are afoot or finished by 3000 owners because of Fiorina's business strategy. Not any specific swipe she took to cleave the 3000 from HP, but the natural evolution of shedding legacy business. Growth across all HP businesses was the 2001 mantra, increases that the 3000 community would not provide for the HP bottom line. "If it's not growing, it's going" was the mandate handed to intermediate managers.

Growth at HP in 2001 led to pruning the enterprise computer line by one notable system. Eight years later, enterprise servers and storage run a weak fourth to Services, PCs, and Imaging/Printer businesses. Three of the four legs of HP's chair are wobbling this year. It's the first genuine challenge CEO Mark Hurd has faced since he was brought in to replace the fired Fiorina. Enterprise solutions that are rich in profitability offered a profound sticky loyalty like the 3000, but they won't lift enterprise fortunes now. HP's moving away from hardware and proprietary environments in favor of services through The Cloud.

Fiorina told 3000 customers at a summertime HP World conference that HP “had never stranded a customer on legacy technology,” the only reference that even came close to a mention of the HP 3000 customers’ transition. Seven years later, HP World is gone forever, but Fiorina is mounting a comeback despite her legacy.

Despite what some community members believe, Carly Fiorina didn't arrive in the HP boardroom to take marching orders. She was hired to be a star CEO whose highest glam moment was sharing the stage with Gwen Stefani. Facing down the HP board's expectations, and marshaling support across a company rich in HP Way heritage -- these were not her strengths. A seat in the US Senate will require campaigning to win the votes of the little people, as well as casting off old millionaire's habits.

Being rich in 2009 -- HP gave her $21 million cash to leave in '05 -- can distance a candidate from people suffering through layoffs and pay cuts. That's one tough quarter that HP just reported, if you think of the company like 3000 users used to: a systems supplier. If not for the ink and services profits, HP might be looking tanked in the middle of this recession. Legacy systems supply long-term support profits, but the vendor is out of that business. No love for 3000s, little for OpenVMS -- it all adds up to making a business relationship out of serving instead of supplying.

Fiorina had to win boardroom fights to edge HP out of the last vestiges of its HP Way. People forget that she championed a merger with a massive PC maker that eked past a shareholder donnybrook. The next plan was to buy Price WaterhouseCooper, a step into the services business. The HP board didn't want to pay that much for a services entry. That same boardroom asked few questions about eliminating a 27-year-old business server line.

Within a year after the PWC failure, storm clouds were mounting around Fiorina. PCs hadn't delivered profitability, even while HP was selling more ProLiants than RISC servers. When the board fired her over an inability to take direction, the messy details were reported out of the boardroom and into the business press. This kind of insight on HP strategy would have been useful to 3000 owners in the year after Y2K. In trying to determine what HP might do about its declining server business today, insights to the past might help.

HP vowed to unmask the source of leaks from its boardroom after exchanges appeared in The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere, the kind of communications control craved by corporations of a certain size. HP ran roughshod over privacy rules in a phone scam afterward, paid $14 million in penalties, and gave new CEO Mark Hurd something to campaign on in his first year: The Return of HP Integrity.

No, he wasn't referring to the HP servers of the same name, but instead being able to believe HP could respect privacy. The final defendant in that spying case just had his sentencing delayed again this week, more than two years after Mark Wagner testified against HP.

Weak strategy from HP's CEO, focusing on commodity hardware and services, leads to a boardroom fight that gets Fiorina fired. The HP 3000 never has a chance in that kind of future. Illegal phone spying gives HP a black eye that still isn't fully healed two years later. And while the services business that Fiorina couldn't sell to the board now keeps HP sales afloat, the former CEO wants to represent California in the US Senate. Nothing ever seems impossible to the only HP chief who was ever forced to resign, until her designs hit the wall. While HP 3000 customers explore options to migrate in an era with frozen budgets, Fiorina will be looking for funding to capture her next job. Like HP customers, she'll need support that doesn't hold her legacy against her.

HP Q3 shows G6 rise, Integrity fall

HP released its third quarter '09 results this afternoon, numbers that showed ProLiant G6 server revenues on the rise while Integrity-based system sales dropped for the third straight quarter. The Intel Xeon-based G6 units like the blade at left operate with Windows and Linux environments, while the HP-UX alternative to the HP 3000 can call upon only Integrity servers.

The quarterly report shows HP managed to beat earnings estimates for the period. However, it took soaring revenues and profits out of the EDS operations to offset steep drops in most other HP sectors, including the Business Critical Servers group that sells Integrity and HP-UX. BCS revenue declined 30 percent from Q3 of 2008, results from a much stronger fiscal year. But not even blade revenues could lift BCS. Blade sales were down 14 percent from last year's quarter. Integrity sales were off by 34 percent versus last year's Q3.

HP CFO Cathie Lesjak said that the G6 ProLiants, just rolled out in April, have performed well in the server sector. These Industry Standard Servers which run Windows and Linux were the only bright spot on a tough enterprise storage and server picture.

"While each of the businesses within ESS was down compared with the prior year sequentially, ISS grew 14 percent as a result of strong customer demand for our newly launched G6 platform," Lesjak said.

In contrast, BCS sales slipped to $578 million for the period, compared to $2.2 billion of the Intel Xeon server revenues. While HP is now selling $4 of ProLiants for every dollar of Integrity, the profitability from the more advanced Integrity revenues is what's keeping Integrity in HP's futures. But the next month or so could tell the tale of how HP enterprise server business will fare in 2010, according to HP CEO Mark Hurd's prior report.

In Q2 of '09, Hurd told analysts that the August-September 2009 timeframe is where HP hopes enterprise computing customers come around and reverse the '09 trends. Hurd explained this enterprise sales stall as companies' mandates to slow down new projects.

I think the more important question is what are those planning sessions looking like in August and September of 2009 about 2010. I think CIOs have been giving marching orders that say "Take that  infrastructure; keep the infrastructure running. If you have to replace things to keep things running, replace it. New projects -- be very particular about new projects you start. And if you can avoid starting that project, avoid starting it." We have customers that tell me, "We're just delaying as long as we can until we have to buy."

Hurd and HP are hoping that an uptick in the economy during this current quarter will pull some FY2010 sales into HP's Q4. Hurd said in a statement that "Business is stabilizing, and we are confident that HP will be an early beneficiary of an economic turnaround and will continue to outperform when conditions improve." Hurd predicted that 2010 will be a better year than 2009, but he doesn't see evidence yet of a turnaround. "We're encouraged I think by the stability that we're beginning to see in the market, but not yet at a point that we're ready to call it a turn," he said.

With the economy not yet rebounding, HP might be cautious about removing any business segment that's been sliding as consistently as the Business Critical Servers. But the HP 3000 was eliminated from HP's plans in 2001 because of its declining growth, albeit in a much different time in Hewlett-Packard history.

While HP's hardware businesses struggled -- even printer sales were down -- services including the EDS unit have become the new engine of the Hewlett-Packard economy. Lesjak summarized the services windfall.

"Drilling into the services business," she said in an analyst conference call, "Q3 revenue was $3.9 billion in IT outsourcing, $2.4 billion in technology services, $1.4 billion in application services, and $711 million in Business Process Outsourcing." Services made up 31 percent of quarterly sales, the largest segment.

But even some service operations are being scrutinized. In the hours before the Q3 call, rumors were afoot that had HP considering a sale of its BPO business. Reuters reported that unidentified sources say BPO, "which provides back-office support to clients, [is] a low-margin business that is not central to [HP] growth plans." Much of BPO is operated out of India.

Overall, the HP Q3 numbers showed only a 2 percent revenue drop over last year's Q3, a report that demonstrates just how much lift the EDS business has provided in a year with steep server declines. PCs also experienced a sales fall-off. The company posted $1.6 billion in total Q3 earnings, $1.3 billion of which came out of its Services group. HP paid $13 billion for EDS last fall, and it reported that 16,000 layoffs out of the 24,600 forecast have already taken place. HP said these "removals" improved its cost structure, one contributor to the HP earnings.

IT pros prefer serving own software

In a spot poll we launched yesterday, a majority of IT pros who manage HP 3000s want to keep software close to their own infrastructure. Although Software as a Service (SaaS) is at the top of HP's new offerings, these computing clouds don't appear to be forming yet for many 3000 customers.

Some of the resistance might rise from a mismatch between the size of companies using the 3000 and the target for HP's cloud computing, says migration provider Birket Foster of MB Foster. Since IT staff is the most costly element of keeping software out of the services category, eventually companies will purchase software for use from the cloud.

"If you won't be able to afford to run an IT datacenter, you'll buy those services from a large provider," Foster said, a firm such as Bellsouth or an ISP. HP's messaging on clouds is aimed at these large companies, he added. 3000 customers who are processing cloud messages at events such as the HP Technology Forum "go because they want to understand how the framework operates."

For the moment, a small share of our poll respondents are considering clouds in their migration plan. But many still see outsourcing as the most compatible strategy to move computing infrastructure offsite. In the Ecometry e-commerce community, Cliff Hart of Shar Music said his firm evaluated "an ERP system that was basically SaaS. They have the servers offsite and you lease seats for your users."

Sharmusic.com sells string instruments through a Web site and catalog to schools, teachers and musicians around the world. The company, which was founded in 1962, was hopeful that the PCS (Profit Center) from Systemax could offer a migration solution to move servers out of Shar's IT operations.

"The concept seemed good," Hart said, "but they seemed to have some trouble getting their package off the ground. I know one Ecometry site migrated to it and had difficulty." Ultimately Shar migrated to the Ecometry Open Systems Windows/SQL application suite and retained software services onsite.

Distinguishing SaaS from outsourcing habits and strategies has been a slow embrace for 3000 customers. The community remembers similar old-school practices such as timesharing, as well as the offerings of the 1990s like Application Service Providers. Companies such as DST Health Solutions and the Support Group host servers for clients who don't need a 3000 onsite, or any other server, so long as able administrators can manage their computers on their behalf.

Migration service provider Speedware sees a trend for custom-app users to keep software inside a small company's infrastructure when they move off the 3000. Product marketing manager Nick Fortin said that some companies aim to replace custom-built apps with packaged apps are more open to consider cloud computing to serve their needs, but Speedware's migration solution customers aim at local resources.

"The tend to aim for low-risk, lift-and-shift migrations of their existing custom-built applications and related supporting environment," he said. "They usually purchase their own servers, software and own the infrastructure that powers them, so they don’t really opt for a cloud computing or software-as-a-service model since they host the apps locally."

Years of practices that keep data and services under company control are not rolling back quickly into clouds for career 3000 managers. "No such plans here, said Jeffrey Elmer, director of IS for Dairylea Cooperative. "We like to know where our data is and who has access to it."

But computing abilities handled by the HP 3000 continue to march out of localized datacenters. Many of these transitions move computer operations to another location, for another team of IT pros to manage via remote access. "They leave the servers in the datacenter -- these days they are normally talking to a lot of other boxes in there -- and push the operations and applications support out to be managed remotely by a third party," said ScreenJet's Alan Yeo. "We see this happening more and more."

The only downside, Yeo quipped, "is that after about a year -- when for some obscure reason someone actually tries to do something at the real console rather than the remote one -- you find that the keyboard has gone sticky through non-use, and you end up having to bang some of the keys to get them to work."

3000 tools still en route to release

In the middle of a summer where security patches seem to fly at the top of IT consciousness, tools and programs for the HP 3000 are still winging their way to a Web site near your browser.

Speedware licensed all of HP's available content for 3000s off the Jazz utility server earlier this year, as well as training programs for migration platform HP-UX. Those free training tools made a debut online this spring, but after a detour of a few months the Jazz utility programs will also be hosted on a Speedware Web site.

"I am probably halfway through what needs to be done for the Jazz [software]," reported Speedware's Webmaster Andre Dubreuil. "I figure by the end of this month everything should be up and available for download."

Some of the rescheduling came as a result of Speedware's new initiative to get more migration projects started before 2010. The vendor points to the end of HP's 3000 support as a good reason to launch a transition to a platform such as Windows or HP-UX.

Security is a more serious issue for those target platforms, judging by the release in recent weeks of patches and warnings. While the Twitter distributed denial of service (DDoS) issue is still hampering that microblogging service -- driven by Linux systems and used on hundreds of millions of Windows clients -- HP continues to roll out HP-UX security patches, including a new denial of service fix for Internet services.

The latest Unix environment patch for HP's business servers closes a security vulnerability with HP-UX running BIND. The vulnerability can be exploited remotely to create a denial of service. HP issued a security bulletin yesterday for patch HPSBUX02451. HP-UX versions B.11.11, B.11.23, B.11.31 running BIND v9.3.2 or BIND v9.2.0 are at risk.

The Twitter DDoS exploits have been traced to an attack on a blogger's site, according to chief security officer Max Kelly at Facebook, which has also been affected. Blogger and LiveJournal also experienced slowdowns, according a Facebook status update. "The attack that caused issues with accessing Facebook and other sites appears to have been directed at an individual, rather than at the sites themselves," the status report stated today.

Security hacks for the DDoS were directed through Facebook and Twitter users. A report in the UK's Guardian newspaper said that attack that disrupted the Twitter site and caused problems for Facebook and LiveJournal was aimed at a a 34-year-old economics lecturer who is an active critic of Moscow's politics in the Caucasus region. "It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard," Kelly said. A similar attack on the blogger last year crashed LiveJournal.

HP keeps rolling Unix security patches

The 3000 community doesn't patch its systems often, but moving your operations to the HP-UX platform will trigger more updates. HP-UX is based on Unix System V, one of the most widely installed environments in the world after Windows and Linux. No environment is breach-proof, but a shift to HP-UX requires a closer watch on patches than in MPE/iX.

While many of these HP-UX patches are only recommended, some critical security holes have to be closed by a patch. HP's rolled out two of these over the last three weeks. One patch only applies to HP ServiceGuard, a product not included on every HP-UX system, but in wide use on mission-critical servers.

But a patch from July 21 identified an "arbitrary code execution" hole for XNTP, the standard time service for Unix systems. Secunia.com called the exploit and the patch highly critical in its advisory. Kerberos also got a critical security patch, HPSBUX02421, last week.

HP has a free program that administrators install on HP-UX servers that "simplifies patch and security bulletin management." Did the HP 3000 ever need such a utility? 3000s eventually received PatchMan to monitor patches of all kinds, though few of the patches were created to respond to security holes. But the server's environment isn't built from an industry standard such as Unix.

HP Software Assistant (SWA) "analyzes a system (and some types of depots) for patch warnings, critical defects, security bulletins, missing Quality Pack patch bundles, and user-specified patches and patch chains" for HP-UX. Many Unix systems include this kind of auto-scan for patches; the Mac OS looks for patches as often as daily, and downloads them (without installing).

Automated HP 3000 environment checking was at its zenith with HP Predictive Support. Like SWA, users needed to enable Predictive manually. It was created in an era when 3000s were only networked on private nets, so HP had to install Predictive modems to enable the checks. But Predictive didn't check for security breaches. A HP Support customer could have the high-failure parts of 3000s -- disks, tapes and memory -- scanned regularly for potential faults. It could also monitor available disk space.

As with HP's 3000 support, Predictive became a casualty of the vendor's exit from the 3000 market. The community got an October, 2006 notice that HP's labs were dropping sustaining engineering and connectivity support for Predictive. HP 9000s, OpenVMS, Linux and Windows systems replaced the functionality of Predictive with the Instant Support Enterprise Edition, starting in 2003. ISEE lasted until this June, when HP replaced it with HP Remote Support Pack and HP Insight Remote Support.

Security patches are free from HP, a vendor that's always watching for liability issues with its customers. HP Insight and Remote Support Pack are employed along with an HP support contract.

Use and understand byte stream 3000 files

Although HP's labs for the 3000 closed at the end of last year, some HP engineers continue to help the community. The HP help was offered most recently on the community's newsgroup, where system architect and former community liaison Craig Fairchild explained byte stream files on the 3000.

These fundamental files are a lot like those used in Windows and Linux and Unix, Fairchild explained. HP engineered "emulation type managers" into MPE/iX, an addition that became important once the 3000 gained an understanding of Posix. In 1994, MPE XL became MPE/iX when HP added this Unix-like namespace.

It's a rare gift to see a primer on 3000 file types emerge from HP today. Understanding the 3000 at this level is important to the customer who wants 3000 third party companies to take on the tasks HP is dropping next year. Fairchild explained the basics of this basic file type:

Byte stream files are the most basic of all file types. They are simply a collection of bytes of data without any structure placed on them by the file system. This is the standard file model that is used in every Unix, Linux and even Windows systems. MPE's file system has always been a structured file system, which means that the file system maintains a certain organization to the data stored in a file. The MPE file system understands things like logical records, and depending on the file type, performs interesting actions on the data (for example, Circular files, Message files, KSAM files and so on).

Fairchild detailed how HP has given bytestream files the knowledge of "organization of data" for applications.

To bridge the gap between standard byte stream file behavior (only the application knows the organization of data) and traditional MPE file type behavior (the file system knows what data belongs to what records), emulation type managers were created. To an MPE application, a byte stream file looks and behaves like a variable record file, even though the data is stored in a way that would allow any Posix application to also read the same data. (POSIX applications also have emulator type managers that allow them to read fixed, variable and spool files in addition to plain byte stream files.) The way that the byte stream emulator detects record boundaries is through the use of the newline (\n) character, which is used, by convention, to separate data in Ascii text files on Unix based systems.

The underlying properties of a byte stream file is that each byte is considered its own record. In MPE file system terms, a record is the smallest unit of IO that can be performed on a file. (You can write a partial record fixed length record, but the file system will pad it to a full record.) Since the smallest unit of I/O that can be performed on a byte stream file is a single byte, that becomes its MPE record size. In the MPE file system, the EOF tracks the number of records that are in a file. Since the record size of a byte stream file is one byte, the EOF of a byte stream file is also equal to the number of bytes in the file. This is why one 4-byte variable sized record is equal to 5 byte stream records (4 bytes of data + 1 \n character).

It's also worth noting that any file can be in any directory location and will behave the same way. (Well, almost. CM KSAM files are restricted to the MPE namespace. And of course the special files (that you don't normally see) that make up the file system root, accounts and groups are also restricted... one root, accounts as children of the root, groups as children of accounts. And lockwords aren't allowed outside the MPE namespace. But other than that the first sentence is true.)

The general model that we had in architecting the whole Posix addition was that behavior of a file does change regardless of where it is located. This was summed up in the saying, "A file is a file." So there are no such things as "MPE files" and "POSIX files". There's just files.

What does change is the way you name that file. Files in the MPE namespace can be named either through the MPE syntax (FILE.GROUP.ACCOUNT), or through the HFS syntax (/ACCOUNT/GROUP/FILE). You can also use symbolic links to create alternate names to the same file. This was summed up as a corrallary to the first saying, "But a name is not a name."

Old HP face reveals newest cloud forecasts

The HP 3000's legacy continues to float around HP, most recently in the work of Christine Martino, the GM and Vice President of the fresh-faced Scalable Computing and Infrastructure Organization. Martino, who's been heading some of HP's Linux and open source efforts, is now general manager of Hewlett-Packard's cloud computing promises. 3000 customers and veterans will remember Martino's marketing work at the end of the vendor's 3000 futures, promising up to the last about the 3000's place at HP.

But one of the market lessons you customers taught HP might have been carried onward to steer those cloud promises. Listen to our 7-minute podcast to hear what sounds thin, what's familiar and what's still-forming in the HP cloud cover. Remember, no matter how you choose to move onward from HP's 3000 era, the vendor still only has eyes for you.

Questions, definitions expand broad scope of HP IT manager skills

HP 3000s work across a vast scope of IT expertise. The computer was sold in the 1980s and onward to replace steel filing cabinets, according to the late 3000 advocate Wirt Atmar. The 3000 also drives  business critical computing so complex that it needs an IT expert to integrate with an enterprise. On the other hand, the casual 3000 user benefits when they better understand the jargon of the system's operating environment.

Whether a customer needs help knowing what a "Gig" is, or would do well to know what CSLT stands for and how to use one, HP offers resources for both kinds of customers. The technical wizards who call IT a career might cringe at the simplicity of HP's "Most Baffling IT Terms," fundamental questions that every computer manager had better understand. On the other hand, the Glossary for MPE/iX 7.5 defines terms that would glaze over the eyes of an office manager who's just acquired 3000 responsibility -- and needs those definitions.

Both levels of resource are necessary for the 3000 community, since the computer was sold as a general-purpose computer solution for decades. Some low-tech everyday office workers have managed 3000s for all of that time. Some are now acquiring 3000 duties and could use that glossary to make their work easier. A few of the 3000 vets may have been out of the general computing loop and could make use of HP's baffling terms.

Those "baffling IT terms" paint with a broad brush aimed at novice computer managers. They include Blu-Ray as well as WEP, and while the former is understood by schoolkids, the latter is a security choice that's weak even by HP's own term definition. (More useful, but missing: A definition of WPA2, a secure choice to protect Wi-Fi.)

HP has produced a series of entertaining, low-tech video primers on technology practices, created for the novice manager using Windows to run a small business. The videos won't get into essential practices such as securing access on a Windows XP account on a PC. But at 12 minutes or so, they deliver more insight than an IT term list.

As for that Windows XP security, even the fundamentals can elude a 3000 manager who's an expert at the likes of lockwords but is faced with protecting a network of Windows PCs. Dave Powell answered such a question from Shawn Gordon, whose 3000 expertise is deep enough to develop 3000 tools.

"A friend has a Windows network with several main servers," Gordon asked, "and the problem seems to be these servers' IPs are exposed to the world at large through their Cisco router (which has selected ports open), and people can use terminal services to log in. There seems to be nothing other than a user ID and password required as long as that user is part of the remote access group, and everyone appears to have the Administrator password."

Powell, who's been a 3000 community contributor of command files for years, replied that shutting down all but crucial services is a good start for managing any computer system. "Part of my standard XP setup routine is to disable several services which various sources have called security risks. “Terminal services” is one of the ones I always disable. In XP, go to control-panel | administrative tools | services."

For the 3000 manager who's inherited administration of a system from a retired expert, securing the 3000 is less a matter of disabling services than understanding what MPE/iX offers. Even after 25 years, one of the best whitepapers on the subject is Eugene Volokh's Burn Before Reading, part of Vesoft's Thoughts and Discourses on HP3000 Software. The paper is online at the Adager technical papers Web site.

HP imagines computing matrix future

Hewlett-Packard says its customers don't care what resources are inside a piece of its BladeSystem server arrays. At the recent HP Technology Forum, the vendor showed off a management console connected to an array of blades on the expo floor. HP Marketing Communications Manager Jason Newton said in an HP blog posting that the customers are more impressed at how much manipulation the vendor offered in the Matrix Orchestration Environment for a blade array like the c7000 above.

At the Matrix booth, I was curious what customers saw.  No one wanted to see inside the server, the enclosure, the switch. It didn't matter. That's just the pool of resources. The "WOW" came from how easy it was to design the architecture, do capacity planning, combine virtual and physical, set up disaster recovery and automate provisioning of complex infrastructure. Configuring and provisioning the network, storage, and compute "just happen" within the Matrix. Right on! One infrastructure, any workload, on the fly. That's the future the private cloud delivers to your data center.

A "private cloud" might remind HP 3000 customers of a virtual private network. But it seems a stretch to imagine 3000 community members who have always shouldered server responsibility thinking that a system doesn't matter. Accepting the promise of cloud computing might demand such refocusing of responsibility, though. Teaching a 20-year IT vet that hardware doesn't matter is a tough lesson.

HP believes it's time to move beyond that level of technology management, applying resource redundancy (multiple blades, abundant storage, extra CPUs) where reliability and resource efficiencies once served. If your hardware is cheap enough, racking up lots of extra processing can get the job done, Newton said.

In that future, you won't care about the stuff inside; only the services delivered, what they costs and how fast you can get them. The future I see coming into focus is the converged infrastructure (melding the best of HP: NonStop, SuperDome, XP, EVA, LeftHand, ProLiant, ProCurve, and BladeSystem) all controlled and interconnected as one. Inside that "matrix cloud." You decide how to carve up the best resources for your workloads and data and Matrix does the rest.

The blog entry did spark one response that diverged from the private cloud promises. It came from a HP customer using OpenVMS, an environment left out of the happy picture of "the best of HP." Ian Miller, an administrator of the openvms.org aggregation site, said "cost will always matter."

For really business-critical stuff, I think people will want to know where it is running and that they have complete control over the environment. No cloud controller, deciding to move your workload at a bad time.

HP has two kinds of customers working in enterprise IT shops -- those who have built up a career's worth of knowledge about system management, and those who haven't invested that much up to now in this kind of technology savvy. When evaluating the next step away from the HP 3000 model toward something midrange like the c3000 at left, migrating sites need to consider how much value their kind of career knowledge will bring to a new environment. The Matrix Orchestration looks aimed at CIOs who want to push buttons, a very different profile from the 3000 customer who's been responsible for server uptime.

Nothing is free in IT management. It's easy to see how these Matrix solutions can improve computing. But everything is a tradeoff. Some HP customers might not care what's inside a rack. But someone needs to care, right? It's not as simple as sunlight inside those racks.

Poke into clouds with HP Labs paper

HP Tech Forum attendees were doused with cloud computing references this year. There's a certain level of buzz that might compel an IT manager or 3000 owner to know answers to basic cloud questions when the queries surface from top management. Within the rich confines of HP Labs Technical Reports, a good Cloud 101 primer is available for download.

This paper released this year is titled Outsourcing Business to Cloud Computing Services: Opportunities and Challenges. The writing in this PDF document is as straightforward as the title; the paper is only 17 pages long and explains differences between Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, Database as a Service, and Software as a Service.

As it turns out, the paper's only table shows that only Software as a Service (SaaS) has any direct use for managers, business owners or business users. The PaaS, IaaS and DaaS are tools for the IT administrator or developer. However, the HP technical writers assert that the time is near for computer owners to be able to access most of their processing needs from the clouds.

Advances in service oriented architecture (SOA) have brought us close to the once-imaginary vision of establishing and running a virtual business, a business in which most or all of its business functions are outsourced to online services.

Cloud computing shares a common goal with the old concept of timesharing: A computing resource managed by a third party that provides storage, processing and administration for a fee. In exchange, the owners of a business or enterprise pursue their business, instead of IT planning and investments.

HP submitted its white paper to the Special Issue on Cloud Computing published this year by IEEE Internet Computing. The paper does include a reference in its back matter to a more promotional HP document about the cloud. But reading what HP Labs has written about cloud computing looks like its hype caliber has been dialed back to reasonable discourse.

Back in the days when timesharing was a common business solution, HP Labs papers came out once a quarter in the Hewlett-Packard Journal. You waited up to three months to receive them, got paper that had to be copied to be shared, and waited for a year-end index issue. Now you can read the history of the 479 issues of the printed Journal from HP Labs Web site, including the issue that unveiled breakthrough compiler technology for HP's PA-RISC systems. The latest Labs papers are online right away, just like so many seems other resources in our modern age. While this Labs research is usually inappropriate for briefings with non-technical management, technologists in the 3000 community can find clear-eyed studies of what's being buzzed about in conferences and airliner cabins.

HP software assists in app management

This is the time of year when HP rolls out its ideals for IT. The vendor who's carrying many HP 3000 enterprises forward on another platform has been preaching the benefits of ITIL best practices in IT for more than two years now, messages rolled out in summertime meetings at the HP Technology Forum and HP Software Universe among other places.

This summer HP exhibited a new tool to collect and analyze ITIL-based metrics. HP DecisionCenter is software that includes the HP Financial Planning and Analysis (HP FP&A). HP bills this software as a tool to help "CIOs take action to reduce variances between planned and actual spending, optimize underutilized assets and accurately allocate IT costs to the consumers of IT services."

When an enterprise grows beyond midrange size, these kinds of issues become as important to a company's top management as reliable backups are to the datacenter manager. The FP&A software links combines a financial planning and analysis capability to a financial data model. It consolidates financial information from project, asset and configuration management systems, as well as ERP software.

This kind of analysis might be familiar to an HP 3000 owner who plumbed the depths of data processing to track performance of a system. ITIL concepts such as Application Portfolio Management can be tracked using a dashboard like the one above that HP says helps "tackle the traditionally high cost of IT."

HP reports that when 200 "IT leaders" were surveyed recently, "nearly half... said they lack investment rigor and have no form of portfolio management in place for aligning IT investment decisions to business priorities." The vendor is offering an IT Performance Analytics module for HP DecisionCenter to assist in this kind of tracking. If a 3000 operation is headed into a larger data enterprise, such as through an acquisition, then ITIL, APM and analysis of investment decisions will become new skills to polish.

DecisionCenter is an analytics suite, an ITIL v3-aligned tool that enables users to "target business priorities and drive process health by discovering bottlenecks and inefficiencies." This tool can be predictive -- you can train it upon a solution your company hasn't adopted, for what-if scenario analysis  to allow IT and business decision makers to model the impact of changes in SLAs, funding, or risk tolerances. Nothing can take the place of pilot projects, rigorous testing or user interviews to learn what solution might replace a 3000. But even as you embark on that task, measuring your business IT goals against financial models provides a clearer picture.

34 summers ago, HP first Communicated

Working in the 3000 community to tell stories gets to be a richer job every year. People I've known since I was a young reporter sometimes pass on relics from the 3000's past. Last month I got such a gift from Steve Hammond, a 3000 veteran who's moved on with his employer to other systems but pursues history as his avocation. A modest white envelope that he gave me contained a piece of history: HP's first Communicator.

The document was HP's first shot into an open sky of communications to HP 3000 users of 1975. June of that year might have been the first summer that HP wanted to share updates about the HP 3000, since the computer had passed through the end of '74 and gotten into summer of '75 with consistent reports of reliability. Issue 1 of the Computer Systems Communicator included a section on the HP 2000 systems as well as the HP 9600 Measurement and Control systems. HP considered the three computers a complete solution to data processing needs of the middle '70s.

Only one of these computer systems has survived into this century, and HP identifies some of the credit for the 3000's longevity in this Communicator's contents: user groups, the first Communicator's theme. A HP 3000 user group was introduced with a board of directors and a mandate for meetings: "The meetings, open to all group members, afford an excellent forum for the exchange new techniques and ideas."

This Communicator also advised 3000 users about "Steps to Produce a Core Dump Tape" as well as an update to a bedrock program still used by every HP 3000 database today, FCOPY.

At 32 loose-leaf pages, the June 15, 1975 Communicator is a fledgling document. There was a good reason that the new HP 3000 Users Group met four times over 1974-75. 3000 technology was quick to change on this new HP business computer, and printed advice couldn't cover what a good talk could in person. Through 1975, two meetings were held in Palo Alto and one each in Chicago and Miami.

HP was also happy to report success for a customer who'd completed an HP 3000 internals course in this issue. "ESL in Sunnyvale, California is involved with various government agencies who as customers demand highly sophisticated applications, some of which are photographic image processing and display and land usage plottage." ESL was writing its own IO drivers and "saw a need for greater understanding of the internal activities of MPE." HP included a contact if customers wanted similar training.

To this day the Communicator continues to hold the internal advice from HP's labs to its more ardent 3000 homesteaders. HP is still making these documents available to the world from its docs.hp.com Web pages. The history there goes back more than 21 summers ago, to the Communicator issue that HP first sent out in 1988 with its groundbreaking PA-RISC MPE/XL 1.0 systems.

The final Communicator, issued one summer ago for MPE/iX 7.5 PowerPatch 5, features a pair of technical articles on IO options that might still be new to 3000 owners. Jim Hawkins, one of the last members of HP's 3000 labs, wrote pieces on High Availability FailOver/iX for FiberChannel Disk Arrays and Limited Support for Ultrium Tape on MPE/iX. A listing of beta test patches, and MPE support details for those arrays aren't available on an HP Web site any longer. (The 3000 community has several experts who can guide customers through installing the high-end arrays; Craig Lalley of EchoTech is the first who comes to mind.) Client Systems has posted a selection of HP labs whitepapers on its rehosted Jazz Web site.

HP offers partly cloudy futures

You can be forgiven if you feel like clouds of computing are rolling past you. Cloud computing, where a remote datacenter's storage and compute power takes the duty of local servers and services, is driving a lot of HP's efforts to attract enterprise business. The concept is defined in so many ways that one analyst offers advice for "cloud sourcing strategists."

At the recent HP Technology Forum & Expo, HP worked to demonstrate how the cloud concept has been assimilated into HP's enterprise offerings. The means range from developing the knowledge to adopt this new strategy through company-maintained, redundant and adaptive servers, to letting HP do it all for you with services. HP's VP of Marketing for its EDS unit has been quoted this quarter as saying "Cloud means a lot of things to different people. Right now the objective, particularly for large enterprises, is to experiment to understand what the implications are."

There's more than one level of experimenting going on here. HP's trying to see what might stick to your budget. Cloud computing is a new term, one being applied to the yeoman work during this tough year's IT sales missions. But cloud computing might be an alternative to HP 3000 ownership if 1. Applications can be found in the cloud to enable a customer's services to its business centers. 2. These applications can be customized to fit company business processes, and 3. The whole solution is as reliable as maintaining your own datacenter.

Reliability is a key to replicating the 3000 value. The HPTF attendee above isn't looking into the clouds for an enterprise solution. He's looking over the ceiling of an HP product that's as non-cloudy as anything can be, but built by the vendor to deliver "Cloud Assurance."

The IT community that prizes HP 3000 experience knows that clouds can disappear for awhile. Everything goes down. Last week one of the most adept of cloud computing providers, Google, saw its services evaporate for millions of users of Google Code, when the Google App Engine went offline. The event of a few hours' outage made a case for the very non-cloudy HP offering, the HP POD. Unlike the cloud, the Performance-Optimized Datacenter is delivered not over a network, but packed in a 40-foot commercial storage container. HP will drop one at your request, overnight.

The POD made a tour stop at the HPTF, where a helpful HP rep offered a slide show that serves as a virtual tour. The POD, explained in plain English, looks like a Datacenter of Impressive Size (DIS) filled top to bottom with server racks and extensive cooling. That's capacity for over 3,500 compute nodes, or 12,000 hot plug hard drives, or a combination thereof. If your local school district is out of classroom space, it might use portable buildings to supplement. POD appears to be the container-based portable building for an datacenter, expanding capacity 4,000 square feet at a time.

For the customer who's lost power, the POD solution can be coupled with a Powerhouse POD. (A Powerhouse not related in any way to the 3000 software company, since it's a massive hunk of hardware instead of a massive hunk of software and license fees.)

These two ends of HP's enterprise spectrum — on one hand, resources you cannot even see; on the other, a solution so large its delivery requires a flatbed tractor-trailer — shows HP casting a wide net. This month the HP Cloud Discovery Workshop debuts, a service to educate you about how cloud computing fits in an IT service provider strategy.

The POD feels more like the HP 3000 datacenter. But HP calls the POD "cloud-enabling computing." By any name, using offsite resources becomes very popular in an economy where few new purchases of capital goods can get approval. Much like the HP 3000, a POD becomes the heavy hardware to make HP promises of services come true. HP wants to offer infrastructure, platforms, as well as software, all as services. Clouds become the ultimate HP virtualization trick, enabled by hardware engineered to be redundant.

HP educates on virtual servers today

The HP user group Connect gave us notice late yesterday that HP will offer instruction in an hour-long Webcast today. Virtual servers offer a potential upgrade for HP 3000 sites who are migrating, but the concepts differ from 3000 fundamental architecture. Andy Schneider of HP will talk at 2:30 PM CDT (19:30 Central Europe time) on Mission Critical Virtualization Solutions with HP Integrity Blades and HP Virtual Server Environment.

Registration for this free GoToWebinar is open online at the Go To Meeting Web site. Schneider, who's with HP's Software Virtualization team in the Enterprise Storage and Servers unit, will show the latest deliverables for HP Integrity Blade server environments,"including processing capabilities, network/storage interconnect technologies, and their interaction with HP Virtual Connect capabilities." This Virtual Server Environment (VSE) is one driver toward migrating to the HP-UX environment.

Promising an insight on "unprecedented business outcomes," the Webcast page says Schneider will talk about the processor and networking upgrades in the Integrity Blade line.

Leveraging on these recent offerings, infrastructure management enhancements in the area VSE’s support of logical servers will be discussed, including expanded capacity planning functions with HP Capacity Advisor, and the related integration with the virtualization and high availability solutions that are integral to the HP VSE environment

HP releases newest 3000 patch

Hewlett-Packard posted notice of a new patch for the HP 3000 late last month. While the repair covers only an obscure problem, the release indicates the vendor continues to test and post minor engineering for 3000 owners.

HP said it would not be creating this type of software for the HP 3000 starting this year. But MPENX21 was built in response to "an obscure security hole" which was reported by Allegro Consultants co-founder Stan Sieler some time ago. While he's not sure when he requested the fix, he has installed and tested the new code — which seems to be the only way to tell what HP has repaired.

HP released the code with a notice as vague as anything community veterans can recall.

This patch corrects the internal specification of a OS code area. Under certain very specific circumstances this oversight left uncorrected could result in a system crash if a purposely written program were to try to access it.

That description will cover just about any security patch for MPE/iX. "Not only are there no specifics," Sieler reported, "but they seem to never tell the original submitter of security problems that their problem has been fixed."

MPENX21 was not built to plug a data security hole, a mission you might expect to benefit HP's remaining 3000 support customers. "It wasn't a hole I was particularly worried about, because it was extremely obscure, and led to a system abort, not to a data security breach," Sieler said.

Hewlett-Packard operated a complete and impressive patch service for 3000s during the 1990s, a period that support experts still recall well. Especially in comparison to the non-information and lack of notice to those who filed service requests (called SRs in the old parlance).

The company's old Software Status Bulletins gave 3000 owners a way to match Known Problem Reports against a list of what the vendor had fixed. This was so long ago the SSB was a thick document issued in print. HP-UX support still can count on Response Center support engineers who who want to get to the root of some bugs which cause system hangs. They follow up, but requests still descend into a cubbyhole where HP decides whether to repair the bugs. System managers report they must notice on their own that a patch sounds like a problem they've reported.

The open source software model doesn't offer vendor-based support such as this, but the level of open source service seems only a little behind what's on offer today. One developer says that all he needs for open source support is a critical mass of people running the software, investigating problems and maybe correcting them, and posting some of the repairs in a manner that can be searched via the Web.

Searching "MPENX21" doesn't yield any Google hits which relate the HP 3000. This is the best reason of all to have a support company backing up your HP 3000 operations. HP has pared back its notifications about operating system repairs.

HP, Dell show caution to the winds

Hewlett-Packard is a bellwether for the world's economy, but the vendor won't toll the beginning of a recovery anytime soon. HP's stock is one of the 30 Dow Jones Industrials blue chips, so its fortunes have a direct impact on the world's perception of economic rebound. CEO Mark Hurd expressed caution last week while he briefed financial analysts in HP's semi-annual presentations.

According to the HP chairman, it's been years since the IT marketplace enjoyed a robust round of purchasing. It was sometime in 2005 when the sales flowed for HP's products, including the servers which HP sells to replace migration-bound 3000s.

"The buildup now of four-year-old desktops, four-year-old notebooks, four-year-old servers, this is creating quite a bubble," Hurd said at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.'s Strategic Decisions conference. "There's going to be a time when there's going to be some real opportunity here."

This kind of bubble has been a steady element of HP 3000 ownership. Five years was the more likely span between major 3000 upgrades, and many customers could push their purchases closer to a decade, so long as business didn't grow too fast. This pace didn't match the churn in PC-based and Unix server sales, so HP retired its 3000 business in favor of the faster-growing IT products.

For now the company's financial and services sectors are providing the majority of HP profits, while ink and printers continue to chip in their 40 percent. Hurd said he's confident HP can hit its profit forecast for fiscal 2009, but he won''t speculate on the timing of a turnaround in tech spending.

HP's chief rival in the Windows-based server arena, Dell, relayed the same kind of caution in the wake of a poor quarterly report last week. The company's CEO Michael Dell said he's "seeing a big deferral of purchases among corporations," while he revealed results for the period that ended May 1. Dell's Q1 earnings dived 63 percent as sales dropped 23 percent.

HP's Q2 report showed the same kind of declining trend as Dell's Q1. Dell posted the second straight quarter of big profit declines. The company doesn't see prospects for improvement. "We don't believe there's enough momentum to call a bottom yet," added Chief Financial Officer Brian Gladden.

HP's Unix rebuffs Java security exploit

A new critical patch for the HP-UX operating environment — a key element in many HP 3000 transition plans — has closed the door on the latest security hack.

Java can be forced to execute rogue code on HP's Unix, as well as many other flavors of the OS from other vendors. Versions B.11.11, B.11.23, B.11.31 of HP-UX are affected, running the Java Runtime Engine 6.0.03 or earlier, or RTE 1.4.2.22 or earlier.

The problem's details, scant as they are, are on the HP IT Response Center Web site page dedicated to the security breach. (You'll need a password and user handle to log in. These are free.) The patch is HPSBUX02429; the service number is SSRT090058.

HP says "you could be at risk of a serious recoverable error if action is not taken." The HP 3000 version of Java doesn't use these more recent runtime engines. But Java on the 3000 isn't a fully functional tool, either.

Not all vendors have written a patch to close Java's security holes under Unix. One back door remains open for Apple systems, even after six months of notice about the breach. Apple's OS X is still missing a patch as of this week, much to the dismay of system admins. One developer has actually published a how-to, proof-of-concept exploiting this breach, to nudge along the Apple patch.

The secured versions of Java for HP-UX are available at HP's Java Web site.

New HP exec forced to focus on servers

A Massachusetts court has ruled that new HP Enterprise Storage and Servers executive David Donatelli can work for Hewlett-Packard. But during his first year, Donatelli will have to focus on the latter part of his organization's solutions. Storage work is out until May of 2010.

That's because Donatelli comes to HP from storage rival EMC, where he signed a non-compete clause promising to forgo employment at any competitor. EMC filed for an injunction to block Donatelli's hiring as soon as it was made public. The suit took three weeks to clear the the Suffolk County Superior Court of Massachusetts. The result is that Donatelli will have lots more focus on less-familiar duties managing server business.

HP revised Donatelli's job title to executive vice president of Enterprise Servers and Networking, rather than executive VP of the larger HP organization ESS. He will report directly to executive vice president of the Technology Solutions Group Ann Livermore until next year, when the court's 1-year ban on storage work is lifted.

HP said in a statement the court order satisfies the vendor, since it didn't see Donatelli's hiring blocked, and he'll have an immediate job running HP's server business. Those operations, which include the HP 3000 alternatives HP-UX, Integrity servers and Windows systems, saw a 29 percent drop in sales during HP's second quarter.

"HP is pleased with the court's recent decision, and looks forward to the contributions Donatelli will make to HP's business."

California courts don't recognize non-compete clauses such as the one Donatelli signed. His lawyer argued that he should be able to move to California and escape his non-compete.

HP profits fall on flagging sales

Hewlett-Packard announced yesterday that its Q2 of 2009 continued a decline in sales and introduced a drop in profits. Even the company's vaunted printer business took a 23 percent hit in sales compared to the 2008 Q2.

In the Q2 report conference call with analysts, HP announced it will cut an extra 6,400 jobs. These cuts are in addition to the 24,600 jobs HP is eliminating as a result of its EDS acquisition. HP stock dropped 4 percent in today's trading, the first since the report was released.

Services, wrapped around support and the new EDS operations, offered HP its largest bright spot in profits. Services poured in an $8.5 billion quarter for sales, revenue which HP said came right out of the EDS acquisition. Toner and ink "consumable" sales were down in Q2 as well. Ink makes up about a third of HP's profits.

Enterprise Storage and Servers (ESS), the HP group where HP 3000 alternatives grow up and roll out, reported revenue of $3.5 billion, down 28 percent. Not even the Windows-friendly Industry Standard Servers could supply a bright spot; both ISS and the HP-UX Business Critical Systems posted 21 percent sales declines. The ESS blade revenue fell 12 percent as well. ESS operating profits fell by more than 60 percent over the prior-year period.

HP put its best face on the steep quarterly sales decline by touting cash flow, rather than sales or profits. "Disciplined focus on operational efficiencies and execution drove record cash flow,” said CEO Mark Hurd. "Our services business continued to deliver strong profitability with an increased deal pipeline and the EDS integration tracking ahead of schedule."

Other upbeat news came from the geographic breakdown of sales. The Americas showed a 12 percent increase while the rest of the world's sales fell 10 percent or more. And that Printing and Imaging Group, while posting fewer sales, maintained its operating profit ($1.2 billion) versus last year's Q2.

The overall profitability picture for 2009's first half is not as bleak as the recent results. GAAP profits have fallen 5 percent from last year's Q2 numbers. But every HP business except Services and Finance posted weaker profits than last quarter. And the total earnings before taxes are down 17 percent for the first half of 2009 against last year's numbers.

OpenVMS survives, but will it thrive?

When HP canceled its 3000 futures, the company was still acquiring tomorrows for Digital's OpenVMS. The two communities were similar in nature but wildly different in size. HP 3000 installations never reached 100,000 servers, and had declined to under 50,000 by 2001. OpenVMS could count more than 400,000 systems running worldwide that year. These numbers decided much of the future for the two multipurpose computer systems.

But each of these environments runs an OS built by a vendor. MPE's nuances made porting it to Itanium a longer shot to pay back the investment. OpenVMS was the darling of the Digital customer base, so cutting it some slack (in engineering time) to earn Itanium status also earned HP goodwill with Digital's customers. After all, they'd already been acquired in the late '90s by Compaq.

News broke this week about changes to the OpenVMS leadership at Hewlett-Packard. Sue Skonetski, manager of engineering programs for the OpenVMS software engineering group, will be "pursuing new opportunities." She's leaving HP after 15 years as the main advocate of the OpenVMS platform, but her tenure with VMS goes back to Digital founder Ken Olson's days. Imagine a GM like Harry Sterling departing the 3000 world and you get an idea of what OpenVMS is losing.

HP replaces Skonetski with Sujatha Ramani, an HP manager of 11 years "who will assume Sue's
responsibilities including Technical Customer Programs and Communications." HP businesses like OpenVMS have gotten replacements like Sujatha in the past, engineers who earned MBAs but arrived with experience in areas like printers and PCs — not the legacy of work in an environment designed before they graduated grammar school.

The OpenVMS community events in 2008 would remind a 3000 user of any MPE meeting 10 years earlier. Customers worry about their share of HP's attention, while the OS lags behind other HP products in adoption of new technology. OpenVMS now has an 8.3-H1 version to run with the Montvale generation of Itanium chips, and the 8.4 version is likely to be a full year behind HP's support for the power-smart Tukwila generation. (Intel is promising a mid-2009 Tukwila rollout, while 8.4 is coming in mid-2010).

3000 community sources have debated whether Skonetski's departure signals the end of the OpenVMS era, or more accurately, how soon that finale will arrive. A similar advocate exists for HP's Unix community. Sometimes there's no one left in a management tree with the same tenure to assume an evangelist's post. While HP engineering may not take a ding in the OpenVMS shift, this proprietary solution is losing someone to champion it from a perspective of growing up alongside the customers. At least the 3000 never had to weather that kind of separation: from Sterling to Winston Prather to Dave Wilde and finally to Jennie Hou, all had two decades and more of MPE in their blood.

OpenVMS veterans who post to the equivalent of the 3000 mailing list were skeptical and worried about the changes to their platform's top brass. That's the nature of a mailing list poster, someone who's often concerned about any changes the vendor unveils with a bland letter. But while a 3000 shop is considering whether HP's Unix is a safe haven for a migration, the customer would do well to see how OpenVMS fares in HP's plans over the next decade. It remains to be seen if HP learned anything from its disengagement with the 3000 community.

HP-UX hardware rises on Itanium adoptions

HP 3000 migrations to Unix trip up on a few fronts, but one hurdle is declining of late. Sales of the Itanium chipsets used in HP's Integrity servers are on the rise, measured both by sales and by percentage of market.

"While the server business is certainly mired in difficult times, the multifaceted community that surrounds Itanium-based systems has special cause for optimism," said Joan Jacobs, president and executive director of the Itanium Solutions Alliance. For more objective markers of Itanium — which must run servers at any site choosing HP-UX — the figures from IDC and Gartner analyst houses back up the claims of the Alliance.

Gartner's report might be most important, stating that in 2008 Itanium machine shipments outgrew RISC-based alternatives. Itanium grew in both sales and shipments, although revenues have not kept the same pace as discounting becomes steep in the non-Windows server world. HP is responsible for most of the Itanium increase. The vendor also has reduced its RISC-based sales to the point where more than 80 percent of HP's non-standard server dollars come from Integrity sales.

This is good news for an HP Unix community that has seen declines in HP's new-customer success, as well as a drop in the HP Unix training at the Connect HP Technology Forum. Selling this Intel-HP solution was not supposed to be this difficult, so the better figures of adoption give HP-UX some breathing room.

IDC pegged the Itanium shipments at an 18 percent rise for the final quarter of 2008. Intel's marketing group in Asia Pacific claims that the processor's business grew while IBM's Power line (the Series p and Series i) fell by 22 percent.

As we've reported before, the fate of the HP-UX alternative to the HP 3000 rests in the good health of Itanium/Integrity. HP has chosen not to port its Unix to any other processor, including the dominant x86 successor Xeon. The vendor is often the first to introduce servers which use the latest in the Itanium family. Intel has queued up it quad-core Tukwila chip as the next-generation 64-bit Itanium processor designed for use in enterprise servers.

The chip maker will now release Tukwila around the middle of this year, Intel officials said. The chip was due for release early this year, but Intel delayed it to add new capabilities to keep the chip in line with future technology advancements.

The Itanium Alliance's statement of good health included notice that high-profile migrations from mainframes are among the sweet spots for Itanium in a world dominated by x86.

"Even as the performance and scalability of x86 architectures make great progress," Jacobs said, "the inherent strengths of Itanium-based technology will continue to prove irreplaceable for mission-critical enterprise workloads, including large-scale databases and data warehousing; for the inevitable migration away from costly mainframes; and for intensive applications that rely on parallel processing, large memories and complicated algorithms."

HP's XP marches onward into new decade

This week marks a fresh decade for HP's XP, the StorageWorks disk array that Hewlett-Packard has been selling since 1999. From humble beginnings in an XP48 configuration, the storage units have grown to XP12000 arrays. The XP48 could take on 48 devices for up to 3.5 terabytes of storage. The XP12000 now acommodates up to 12 petabytes of storage, or about 3,000 times as much as 1999's XP48.

An HP executive of more than 18 years storage experience recalls this week that HP 3000s were in the earliest target market for the XP devices. But the storage arrays didn't even gain the XP name until storage competitor EMC sued HP. Hewlett-Packard landed on the "XP" years before Microsoft picked those two letters to stamp its latest Windows. The XP arrays are a homesteading solution as an upgrade to existing internal storage, and the latest models can serve multiple operating environments all at once in migration and transition environments.

3000s were one of the first two targets to sell XPs. StorageWorks Marketing Communications Manager Calvin Zito writes in the Around the Storage Block blog on HP's Communities site, "One of my roles was to work with our server divisions--our HP3000 and HP9000--about the coming XP Disk Array.  Since HP was reselling [Hitachi's] high-end product, they needed to be in a position to integrate the XP into their offerings."

Zito goes on to comment on a "Five Nines" initiative for the HP9000 group, a clue that these big arrays had more initial targets in HP's Unix enterprise customer sites. But he had his start as an HP 3000 CE in the 1980s before moving into HP marketing and then storage.

The vendor called the XP arrays stress-free in 1999, and bullet-proof in 2006. A fun test followed. HP used 70 pounds of C-4 explosives to blow up an XP12000 array in 2007, along with servers, to show how fast enterprise systems could be switched over to hot sites. But the first explosion for this line was to jettison its initial name, once EMC learned that HP was launching the SureStore E Series MC256. HP reps and partners were calling it the array the Series E MC256.

The two companies parted ways in 1999's summer when EMC ended its resale contract with HP — once HP put its own brand on a competing disk product manufactured by Hitachi. The vendor's relations with EMC have slid to the point where the leader of EMC's storage sector jumped a non-compete clause to join HP, assuming the post of retiring executive Scott Stallard. Stallard led the HP enterprise server business, among other duties.

But the XP arrays have always been a compatible partner with the HP 3000. The latest editions of the devices require a management console which has nothing to do with MPE/iX, but that kind of controller is standard for arrays these days.

HP nabs EMC storage exec as ESS chief

HP named a new top executive to its Enterprise Storage, Servers and Networking group this week, a new hire leading HP's business server group after he left EMC following mandatory pay cuts there in March.

David Donatelli takes the executive VP post at Hewlett-Packard on May 5 after leaving his job as chief of EMC Corporation's storage group. Donatelli, who saw his EMC pay cut by 10 percent in March, takes over for retiring Scott Stallard, an HP veteran of 24 years who oversaw the company's blade server success.

EMC's CEO cut pay for five top executives including Donatelli. HP's CEO Mark Hurd said “I am pleased to have David join the HP leadership team. He will be a key contributor in driving growth and innovation for HP.” Donatelli, who saw a pay cut from $700,000 to $630,000 at EMC, has filed a lawsuit against his former employer to protect his move to HP. EMC filed a suit against him that charges he violates a non-compete clause through his jump to HP.

Donatelli comes to lead HP's server business with significant experience in storage, but little current work in the server segment. The HP enterprise server unit, which develops and sells HP 3000 migration targets such the Integrity server line, posted the largest drop in revenues in the latest quarterly report. Donatelli heads to HP with detailed knowledge of EMC's new server-network-storage alliance with Cisco.

Pay cuts will also commence for HP's top executives this month. The company's numbers in hardware and enterprise products fell sharply in Q1 of 2009. HP reported sales declines in the ESS operations of Business Critical Systems servers (including Integrity systems) of 17 percent, along with a 22 percent drop in Industry Standard Servers (including ProLiants).

HP is hiring a executive to oversee its new BladeSystem Matrix, a combination of servers, storage and networking designed to create virtual computing resources. The blade-based virtual datacenters promise a new level of flexibility in deploying computing power across enterprises.

Donatelli worked at EMC from the company's earliest days, leaving the vendor after 22 years. Stallard announced his retirement last year and leaves HP after 34 years of service. Donatelli reports to HP's executive VP for all computer-related sales Ann Livermore.

“David is an experienced business executive with a track record of driving growth and innovation,” said Livermore. “I look forward to what the team will accomplish under his strategic leadership."

California aims at changes for offenders

HP 3000s track offenders in California prisons. Ever since he left HP's COBOL labs, OpenMPE director Walter Murray has worked in the Enterprise Information Services division of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. HP has announced a big contract to revamp the department's computing through the vendor's EDS subsidiary.

HP's press release says that the engagement "streamlines dozens of databases, record keeping processes and systems with a single integrated solution. The resulting highly-automated environment will include software, hardware and processes designed to transform paper-based adult and juvenile offender records into digital records."

The HP release calls this work "applications modernization services." Making applications more modern in the prison system probably won't eliminate their building block: COBOL.

The HP 3000s may now have an exit date set for them -- it looks like 2013, more than two years beyond HP's end of support deadline. But the language these systems use is likely to remain in Murray's toolset for the department, which he calls CDCR.

Yes, I’m very aware of the project to “modernize applications” at CDCR. Yes, SOMS -- the Strategic Offender Management System -- will involve replacing HP 3000s with something more modern.

However, speaking only for myself, I don’t think I’ve written my last line of COBOL just yet.

COBOL is another way to define a platform for customers' applications, especially apps created and cultivated in-house. Other platforms include databases (IMAGE vs. Eloquence vs. Oracle), vendors of systems, and complex, enterprise-sized packaged apps such as ERP systems. Migrating more than two of these platforms at once increases risk for anyone but the shops who can afford to hire outside expertise.

A CDCR release says that 40 systems will be consolidated in a project budgeted at almost a quarter-billion dollars. The four-year effort from EDS "will allow custody and programs staff to better manage the offender population, which should lead to a reduced recidivism rate."

HP pushes blades with solution blocks

Hewlett-Packard enjoys a leading position in blade server market share. The company's margin is a key element in the message that bladed servers are the vendor's new heartland for IT enterprise solutions. Both Windows and HP-UX can be deployed on blades. The former represents the bigger part of HP's blade share, so the latter was the topic for a recent Webcast hosted by the Connect user group.

Connect has posted the slides for the Webcast, a 60-page deck that might have been difficult to finish during the one hour time slot. One at the end stood out as a new offering, packaged like old 3000 products. HP calls these Solution Blocks, "hassle-free ordering, configuring and customizing of multiple applications. Starting with... HP-UX 11i on an HP platform provides a foundation for adding the required server, storage and tape backup blades to complete your infrastructure."

Solution Blocks are packed and deployed by HP's application resellers, so the business model aligns with the part of the HP 3000 customer base that purchased turnkey solutions, like Summit's Spectrum credit union app. HP's Webcast stressed that Solution Blocks reduce risk while optimizing deployment. Mitigating risk is high on the typical management list when a 3000 shop chooses to migrate.

There's the risk in remaining on the 3000, mostly the reality of declining community resources. But migrating also poses risks. A Washington State college consortium is regrouping this year after a $14 million project bottomed out. A Solution Block might not have helped there, but the point is to simplify any deployment.

HP and Connect didn't position the HP-UX blade server Webcast as a migration message. But the 3000 community is evaluating HP's Unix blades as a transition target. For the mid-sized customer with lean Unix skills, Solution Blocks might help. HP has the blocks organized by enterprise-size solutions and those targeted at mid-size companies. As an example, the SAP Business All-in-One is offered to mid-size firms with what HP calls "overbuilt" hardware.

The HP  BladeSystem for SAP Business All-in-One (AiO) Solution  Block running on HP Integrity server blades and the  HP-UX 11i operating environment. With the highly reliable HP BladeSystem infrastructure,  we’ve overbuilt the enclosure to set new standards of  readiness and certainty. It can accommodate 10 cooling  fans, six power supplies, four pairs of switches, and IO bandwidth of 5 terabytes—so your  business’ mission won’t stop.

Solution Blocks will probably be on the list of offerings from any reseller who's packaging HP's Unix along with applications. Unix has been a roll-your-own, highly customized solution for a long time. The blocks might make a Unix migration less complex.

HP serves up Integrity blade broadcast

Hewlett-Packard will promote the virtualization features of its bladed Integrity HP-UX servers in a Webcast tomorrow (April 23). The broadcast begins at 11 AM CDT (1600 GMT), led by HP's Tom Vaden, who works on HP-UX architecture.

Registration for the Webcast is available at Gotomeeting.com Web site. You won't need anything special to access the Webcast other than a recent Windows or Mac OS version. A VOIP option is available for audio in addition to a standard phone dial-in number.

HP says the training broadcast — if you consider its hardware-software presentations training — will also cover power, cooling and management features of using blades with HP's Unix.

During this presentation, we will examine how HP-UX delivers its mission critical value proposition in bladed configurations. It will explain how the marriage of HP-UX and Integrity Server Blades enhance the core areas of the Adaptive Infrastructure especially for mission critical applications. The presentation will pay particular attention to the virtualization, power and cooling, and management advantages of HP-UX in a bladed environment.

Community needs HP support users to test final FTP patch

A new patch to repair a broken command in FTP/iX needs testing now, but the 3000 community must now rely on HP support customers to test HP's lab work. The FTPHDK7A patch repairs the MGET command in the 3000's FTP file transfer program, the industry standard to move files between servers. But like a significant number of HP's 2007-08 lab projects, this patch is trapped in beta-test limbo.

HP's release policy remains unchanged about the patches it's created. Each one must be tested by 3000 owners before the vendor will release the patch to all 3000 sites, even the customers who don't use HP support. The beta-test limbo has seen a lot of patches check in, and far fewer checked out for public release. HP was supposed to be considering reducing the test requirements. But the vendor closed its lab without altering the policy.

OpenMPE has a list of unresolved 3000 issues like this one that HP left behind. MGET isn't critical unless a customer needs bulk transfer of many files in a directory. The bug also existed in last year's HP-UX version of FTP, according to Allegro's Donna Hofmeister. But the HP-UX version of this patch received the tests needed for a full HP release.

Even though HP now has only support division level engineers working on 3000 issues until 2011, nothing is different for the vendor. HP wants to avoid giving any supported customer an under-tested patch. But only HP's support customers can free up this beta-test software. HP won't let the full 3000 community do any beta testing — even after OpenMPE asked to set up a non-customer beta test team.

What's more, HP's engineering load was so heavy last year, the 3000 labs only had enough manpower to create MPE/iX 7.5 patches. FTPHDK7A is only crafted for this latest MPE/iX. At least half the 3000s today are running an earlier release. But even this 7.5-only software needs HP support customers to help the homesteaders.

"If you still have an HP software support contract and are willing to apply the patch -- for the good of the community, frankly -- please call the Response Center," said Hofmeister. Her husband James, who's in the HP's networking support center, discovered the bug last year. "In order for the patch to be General Released, more people need to request and install the patch. Be a good sport and place a call," Donna added.

Until the patch is sprung from beta jail, the GET command, one file at a time, will have to be workaround for FTP. HP had  better reasons for its exacting test process when the community of 3000 users was bigger and patches still rolled out of the lab. In 2009, the policy is a relic, outdated procedure designed to protect HP's liability rather than assist the full 3000 community.

Open source sites losing free resource

One of the few Web sites hosting genuine freeware for the HP 3000 removed its open source software this spring. After discussion with Speedware's product manager Nicolas Fortin, Mark Bixby decided to remove the copies of programs such as the Apache Web server that he'd ported to the 3000. Bixby, who also worked on HP 3000 Internet and networking software at HP, said that neither Speedware or HP asked him to thin out his versions of the open source software.

The thinning out was of my own accord. Mostly I pruned away everything that was either on Jazz or in the 3000's FOS. I did this cleanup after Nick Fortin contacted me about their takeover of the Jazz content. I felt it was confusing for me to still be providing outdated/duplicate versions of stuff. So the conspiracy theories can put be away. There was absolutely zero HP involvement in this decision.

Speedware's Fortin said he e-mailed Bixby "to ask if he was interested in having us host some of his files, as a backup to his own site, or even just point a link to his site. I never would have asked him to remove his content; that, surprisingly, was his suggestion."

Removing the open source software is only an issue for anyone in the 3000 community who wants unrestricted use of it. The programs on bixby.org were not controlled by the HP rehosting legal agreement which regulates access to such software. Bixby created and released his ports under the industry's GNU Public License (GPL), which permit alteration, updates and unrestricted redistribution.

These 3000 open source programs are coming online this spring at Speedware's new 3000 software resource site, and are already hosted at former HP 3000 distributor Client Systems. A 3,000-word HP End User License Agreement has been applied to all the Jazz software being re-hosted, including the open source programs. One open source expert has doubts the HP agreement is in line with GPL freeware licenses.

Brian Edminster, an expert on open source solutions for HP 3000s, has been working on an open source repository, free to the 3000 community. Edminster took note of the removals on Bixby's site and said the HP license might violate public license terms — but only a lawyer could be sure.

I'm of the opinion that HP may be in violation of the license agreements covering the Free/Open Source (F/OSS) packages that are part of the Jazz collection. In order to be absolutely sure, I'll have to verify the license under which each was originally written. Then I'll likely have to engage the services of one or more Intellectual Property lawyers that have done F/OSS work before. Unfortunately, there's enough confusion  - and this is a new enough area of the law - that it's as easy to get two differing answers to the same question about F/OSS as it is to get differing answers to tax questions, even when posed to the IRS!

Considering that the 3000 community is made up of companies with legal departments, the dense HP agreement applied to open source could have a chilling effect on how much the software might be used. Edminster said it appears to his eye that HP may be countermanding the redistribution rights of the software.

Early in that [HP license] is a restriction specifying that anything you use from the collection is 'only for your own use, no further redistribution is allowed'. That clause, when applied to the source-code of the F/OSS content, would be in direct violation of the 'free and unencumbered source code' clause in all F/OSS agreements that I'm aware of.

But while HP had no hand in Bixby's decision, the result is that HP's agreement now covers even more of the 3000 open source spectrum. Speeware, for its part, had to accept the HP license terms in order to be able to rehost other software from Jazz such as HP-written free programs. The EULA covers everything, however, with an "Ancillary Software" provision for public freeware. Of this, Edminster said

In the sections referencing the open source content, there might be exceptions noted in the fine print that my glazed-over eyes missed. That's part of the reason for having a legal professional look at it before even considering taking HP to task.

HP leads G6 virtual tour online

HP showed off the future of online training yesterday during its three-hour ProLiant G6 Web Jam. The event that introduced the latest generation of Windows servers consisted of several recorded briefings from inside HP's ProLiant labs in Houston, live chats between viewers and HP staff, as well as documents such as white papers and data sheets.

That last element was provided in an Event Bag, a zip file of documents you select during the broadcast of the videos. HP ran the production out of its Virtual Events Central Web site. The interface conjures up a visit to a computer conference with separate entries to a networking lounge, exhibit hall or auditorium. On the main page of the conference "lobby," animated attendees pass across a carpeted area. (Traffic this light would have exhibitors upset at a real event.) It's all meant to invoke the spirit of attending a show. In some aspects, HP's Tuesday presentation did more than the vendor might have intended to cook up the show experience.

HP would not go to the expense to create this event without making it available afterward. You can still go to www.hp.com/go/web-jam to register and see the G6 team's videos and fill up your event bag. Being there yesterday would have put you in the company of several hundred other "attendees" for networking inside chat rooms.

If you'd dedicated time to watch the full event, and had a prerequisite knowledge of the ProLiant hardware, yesterday would have been training time well spent. HP essentially turned on a video camera when it briefed partners and staff about the sixth generation of ProLiant servers. Like at any good conference, HP's more technical presenters told the unvarnished truth about product design. One member of the Blades SWAT Team showed mentioned a component whose failure erases a ProLiant's midplane board serial number.

The unidentified member of the HP Blades SWAT Team also offered assurance that ProLiant customers will be able to recover from such a failure.

There’s only one active component on it. I always thought it was a bit ironic that if [this component] dies, the only thing that will happen is that you will lose the serial number as well as the spare part replacement number — the two things you need to replace this. Luckily, if you’re using System Insight Manager, the information is stored in your SIM database. But besides this component, this is nothing but a big thick piece of plastic with a lot of wires running through it.

HP includes an Onboard Administrator in every G6 that communicates with the SIM. HP says the component "is like having a programmable administrator inside each server. On HP ProLiant 100 series G6  servers, ProLiant Onboard Administrator Powered by iLO100 works hand-in-hand with HP Systems  Insight Manager, RBSU, ORCA, and the embedded Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) to  provide entry-level remote management and control."

The briefings unfolded in presentations of up to 20 minutes that reminded me more of reality TV than an HP infommercial. The camera work was on-the-fly instead of rehearsed, and sometimes the audio was a little light on the volume. When the attendees in the meeting rooms posed questions,  HP identified the speakers with a caption at the bottom of the screen. (You couldn't capture that bit of information in a real conference.) You can look at a few minutes of video from the teardown briefing by clicking on the screen shot above.

Those asking questions were clearly already well-versed in the ProLiant lineup, so this event might not have been much help for the novice Windows server administrator. You wouldn't find much contention in the Q&A, either, something that enriches a genuine conference session. It's not a stretch to say that those on hand were only examining how much greater the ProLiant-Windows solutions had just become. For example, John Obeto of SmallBizWindows.com (center, below) spoke up during the hardware tear-down session. Obeto wrote in 2006

We, contrary to current thought, encourage small businesses to upgrade to Windows Vista immediately upon release. Why? Barring any unforeseen last minute eventualities, [we count on] our experience with Vista [starting with] the release of Beta 1 back on August 3rd of 2005. Without a doubt, the security and usability enhancements alone make upgrading to Vista a no-brainer.

 There's not much need to color that exhortation in 2009, considering the disappointment that Vista has visited on so many customers. But with Miocrosoft and HP reportedly extending the Windows XP experience well into 2010, Vista is no reason to avoid these new ProLiant G6 units. They'll drive an enterprise with Windows 7, as an alternative.

If you've ever wondered what a factory tour at HP is like, the Web Jam's contents will give you a taste. Watching units come off an assembly line might not solve many system management problems in the future; it never did that for the customers who earned HP 3000 factory tours, either. But you could develop relationships with factory staff on those tours. At least in 2009, a tour like the one at the Jam will still enhance your confidence about investing in HP's solution. That was always the point of the 3000 factory tours, too.

I'm looking forward to a Web Jam for the HP Integrity server line, too, since the vendor has been promoting the Integrity as a 3000 replacement. The G6 Jam was produced by the Industry Standard Server (ISS) part of HP -- an operation with roots in Compaq's business and based in Houston (thus, the Central Daylight Time schedule for the event.) Integrity rolls out of a different HP unit.

HP shows off Gen 6 ProLiant servers

Register this morning for today's Webcast series to take the complete tour of HP's newest G6 ProLiant server line. The event is a string of seven Web presentations from HP covering the alternative hardware the vendor offers to many HP 3000 migrating customers.

HP calls this sixth generation G6, and these Webcasts start at 10 AM CST and run through early afternoon US Central Daylight Time. HP says

These Webcasts will bring you on-site to the ProLiant manufacturing facilities and server farms. You'll see product tear-down and meet the product managers and other HP personnel. After you've had a look, you can ask the engineers questions and meet independent bloggers who have similar jobs and interests.

Although the production values of these events will remind you of commercials, there's usually a good share of information to be picked up from evaluations like this from your desktop. Windows is shaping up as the most likely migration target for a 3000 customer, and the ProLiants are built for Linux as well.

HP's tentative agenda (times CDT) as of the evening before the event:

10:30   Intel Xeon 5500: HP has taken Intel technology to a whole new level. Check out what's under the hood: An HP ProLiant G6 server deep dive
  
10:45  Meet the Blades SWAT team. Take an in-depth look at HP's BladeSystem with the Blade SWAT team in their engineering lab.
  
11:15  See how easy HP makes it to dramatically simplify server set-up
  
11:45  Get "Greener IT" from HP -- Use your power wisely and dramatically reduce wasted energy
  
12:15  Factory Express – See a quick view of where it all comes together: HP’s customized and integrated factory solution tour
  
12:45  Squeeze every bit of productivity out of your server with ProLiant G6

PING, IMAGE made easier on 3000

I’m looking for a program that will read IMAGE log files. I know Bradmark has something to analyze these files that I can purchase, but at the present time I really don’t have any money in the budget. What’s available for free?

Cathlene McRae of HP helps out:

CATCHLOG is a good program to use, and it can be obtained at the new Jazz sites. The first one open is at Client Systems: clientsystems.com/hpe3000downloads.html

I have a new HP 3000 A500 installation that I can't Telnet to. Ping works both ways, but I get nothing with Reflection's Telnet. What do I need to check on the 3000 to get Telnet running?

Robert Schlosser says:

Two things come to mind: Check if the JINETD job is running [run it by streaming JINETD.NET.SYS]; and if the line "telnet 23/tcp" is in your SERVICES.NET.SYS file.

OpenMPE director Donna Hofmeister adds:

You also need to have INETDCNF.NET configured.

There's a collection of 'samp' files in .NET that in most cases need to be copied to their 'real' file name in order to make TCP/INETD networking work.

Hofmeister, one of the community's more experienced hands with the standard Unix and Posix utilities built into MPE/iX and the HP 3000, explained.

The samp files are

BPTABSMP -- bootptab (most people don’t use)
HOSTSAMP -- hosts
INCNFSMP -- inetd configuration
INSECSMP -- inetd security
NETSAMP  -- reachable networks
NSSWSAMP -- nsswitch
PROTSAMP -- protocol
RSLVSAMP -- DNS resolving
SERVSAMP -- services

I believe each of the files also has a counterpart in /etc which is a link to the real file in .NET.SYS. If the real files are missing from .NET.SYS then many things (including Telnet and FTP) won’t work.

HP plugs SSL exploit for HP-UX

Hewlett-Packard's support team announced a security alert for all HP-UX servers running any version of HP-UX 11, warning the community this week that the OpenSSL security mechanism can be used to breach HP's Unix system.

Unix exploits generate critical warnings on a regular basis for HP-UX servers. To mitigate the risk, HP patches up such breeches as quickly as possible. The latest information on how to keep the security tool SSL from becoming a Unix back door, by adding patch HPSBUX02418, is available at HP's IT Response Center (ITRC) Web site.

SSRT090002 rev.1 - HP-UX Running OpenSSL, Remote Unauthorized Access
Content Type: HP-UX security bulletins digest
PRIORITY: Critical
OS: HP-UX,UNIX
Release Date: 03/30/2009

HP notes that HP-UX users such as those who have migrated to the company's HP 9000 or Integrity platforms will need a Response Center login ID and password to read the security bulletin. And to comply with HP's requests, the information excerpted above is

Copyright 2008, Hewlett-Packard Company. All rights reserved. All product and company names referenced herein are trademarks of their respective owners.

You can sign up for automatic notice of these recurring alerts. HP instructs system administrators to initiate a subscription to receive future HP Security Bulletins via e-mail at the HP Web page for bulletins:

On the Web page: ITRC security bulletins and patch sign-up
Under Step1: your ITRC security bulletins and patches
    - check ALL categories for which alerts are required and continue.
Under Step2: your ITRC operating systems
    - verify your operating system selections are checked and save.

HP makes changes to patch alerts

Migration customers from the HP 3000 community will experience a change in the automated patch reports the vendors sends, starting in June. The new format removes some crucial and exacting information that was delivered in text-only format of the alerts. As a bonus, the service leaves new room for HP to promote its product specials.

Automatic notice of patches has been a vital and crucial service from HP's support department. Since we signed on for the alerts and notices in the spring of 1997, countless notices have been delivered via e-mail about HP's repairs to software and firmware. While this won't be much of a change for the MPE/iX user — HP ceased such repairs for all types of HP 3000 problems in December — HP's other enterprise computer users will be impacted.

Plainly put, this appears to be a reduction in HP's service levels. Perhaps the vendor always intended to reduce this free-to-the-community level of support. Anyone could sign up for the text-only notices, the most efficient gateway into HP's byzantine and overstuffed database of problem resolutions. Perhaps the new format, coming in a few months, will not sacrifice as much as appears today. But the revised format, a PDF file (shown above, click for more detail; here's a file to download), one that replaces technical details with sales information, suggests a slippery slope leading away from ownership value.

Patch notices such as the old format (at left) opened the door to the fair and balanced distribution of needed support deliverables. You didn't need to maintain an HP support contract to use patches that the vendor engineered. You do, however, need to know as soon as they are available if you're to avoid a system failure or service interruption. HP's support engineers have the most complete data on this — provided that your company buys HP support services. No support contract, well, then you get the circus flyer of the PDF file.

Third party support companies in the HP marketplace might see this change as good for business as well as the future ownership value of HP's enterprise servers. These good companies — many of whom support HP's Unix systems as well as MPE/iX servers — still have their own HP support contact to rely upon. But using a marketing tool for the rest of the community, dressed up around critical information, smacks of an HP now feasting on the growing complexity of using business computers in an enterprise environment. Selling printers alongside critical patch data is like being offered a cable TV upgrade while you're getting a medical consult on an MRI result.

Perhaps the increased revenues from the marketing will persuade Hewlett-Packard's Services executives they can afford to reconsider this change. There's has to be a pony somewhere underneath all of this muck in the vendor's stalls.

Used servers may have lost their licenses

The 3000 community can count on third party resellers to provide fresh HP 3000s for years to come. While these systems will not be factory-fresh, they bring new horsepower and connectivity to sites that need upgrades. Homesteading customers as well as long-term migration projects require refreshed 3000s.

But an offer of a 3000 system does not always include a license for MPE/iX. Even though HP once said that an MPE license can't ever be separated from a server, during the past several years that has not been true. Customers who toe the legal line for 3000 ownership might find a 3000 out on the market without a legal MPE license. And such servers turn up because Hewlett-Packard created them, through deals or oversight.

A 3000 can lose its license when an owner trades across for a comparable HP-UX license, HP has explained. The server does not return to HP in many of these cases; it can be difficult to get HP to pick up a retired 3000 system, even while the vendor is installing an Integrity server to replace the hardware.

Tracy Johnson of the OpenMPE board of directors said that HP's upgrade engineers sometimes have left a license-free 3000 in their wake.

There were chassis upgrades done by official HP CEs which after having done their work, sometimes they left the old HP 3000 in their place. So the [MPE] license was transferred to the new HP 3000, leaving he old HP 3000 without a license (even though the old HP 3000 would still function just fine).  These boxes were sometimes retained by customers as “test machines” and could possibly (even probably) be upgraded by simply using official HP SLT+FOS+SUBSYS tapes a second time.

These license-free systems are sold in the third party market. HP introduced a '"lost license" program for customers to get MPE/iX onto HP 3000s which don't meet HP's Software License Transfer standards. HP's process addresses a system "which has no documented history, such as aPO, invoice, or a support contract. We have created a stand-alone MPE/iX Right To Use license (AD3777A) that is not coupled with any secondary hardware system sales." But Johnson believes "I would think those [license-free upgraded] boxes would be ineligible" for the lost-license program.

The concept of a license-free HP 3000 surfaced on the 3000 newsgroup not long ago when Cypress Technology offered an N-Class server for $3,300. Competing hardware vendor Client Systems asked if the N-Class box was a "de-licensed State Farm server."

HP charges for its "lost license" program, although less than the RTUs cost at introduction now that the prices have dropped 35 to 50 percent. A N-Class system is not the usual kind of 3000 which has its MPE cashed in for comparable HP-UX licensiing; that kind of swap happens more often for older Series 900 HP 3000s.

HP has set a deadline on how long it will operate its lost license program for MPE/iX. When the vendor exits the market altogether on Dec. 31, 2010, the lost license RTU progam ends.

Jazz freeware emerges with restraints

HP's only authorized reseller for HP 3000 products, Client Systems, unveiled the first public re-hosting of the Jazz software utilities today, but the programs are penned up behind a thicket of legal language from an HP materials agreement. While initial response from the community complained about the Materials Use Agreement, the terms gauntlet was tossed down by the HP Development Company, not Client Systems. (The screen shot above illustrates the standard display of the terms at the Client Systems Web site. Click to enlarge it, though it will not help.)

The dense legal restrictions might have been already in place in HP's mind before Jazz left Hewlett-Packard's 3000 division. But the agreement was finalized only about two months ago, and the vendor insisted that any re-hosting licensee accept the terms — and that re-hosting organizations demand that community users accept terms before using the freeware. Unless the users click to agree, they cannot access the Jazz materials. (Well, there is a way to access the software download page directly, although the path sidesteps the legal agreement.)

Computer users blast through such End User Licensing Agreements every day, from installation of updated software to downloads of freeware. But the Jazz software targets a more advanced user, the IT manager, director or administrator of business systems. Early responses to the document that restrains Jazz use were not kind.

"Give me a month to read through all that fine print, and pass it off to the legal department," said Craig Lalley, owner of consulting firm EchoTech. "Then I will be happy to comment on the content." While the agreement might make HPDC and its attorneys happy, the presentation to the user community could be some of the sorriest Web display I've ever seen for a critical piece of information. At the least, could it be in black type on the white background?

Client Systems is not the only outlet for Jazz and the Gordian knot of the agreement. Speedware also contracted with HP to host the software and documentation, resources that HP once distributed without this forced-click agreement.

That was a different HP era and a different segment of HP doing the distribution, however. Standard practices today include a 5,000-word, 39-page agreement which references four other HP licensing documents and lays out a $5 compensation fee for any damage caused by the Jazz freeware.

On the other hand, since the Web page collects no information by name of its visitors, it's hard to see how HP might be able to enforce or pursue any tresspass through its forest of controls. Client Systems admits the re-hosting is a work in progress. Dan Cossey invited the community to comment on the Client Systems presentation and hosting at his e-mail, danc@clientsystems.com. For those who don't read these things anyway, the wealth of HP's programming is just a click-to-accept away.

3000 resources held by HP's IP division

The 3000 community thinks of Hewlett-Packard's 3000 operations and sees faces it knows and voices it has heard. While the master of R&D Ross McDonald made a career of staying out of sight, the computer has had business managers since 2005 in Dave Wilde and Jennie Hou, and liaisons such as Jeff Vance, Jeff Bandle, Mike Paivinen and Craig Fairchild. Every one was at least a part-time employee of the HP 3000 division, or virtual CSY as they liked to call it.

All these faces and voices are now gone. HP's 3000 operations are run by two overseers. Bernard Detreme manages the Worldwide Support ops, just about the only place a customer can still buy something 3000-specific from HP. Determe made a conference call appearance last spring, but he's not a face well-known by your community.

The other overlord of 3000 intellectual property is the Hewlett-Packard Development Company. The CSY staff always had to deal with HPDC, and four initials trumped two. In a matter for lawyers and licensing, the Development Company has insisted on hanging on to copyright and property rights for software that HP will not support by 2011 — as well as software HP never supported, like the freeware programs from the Jazz server.

    There’s some good luck in what’s happened to the programs of Jazz. But there’s also bad precedent being set, even as good companies arrange to re-host Jazz contents. Good is the cost in dollars, and the fact that 3000 friends outside HP have wrangled licenses to share. Bad is the concept of open source getting branded as HP goods, as if the Jazz server’s disk drives don’t have enough space for the idea of giving something away with a generous license to share.

    HP is staking a claim on some Jazz programs which live a life outside the vendor’s reach. LDAP, Java, perl, sendmail: the list of what HP says it “produced/ported” includes almost every standard utility or subsystem. These fine-print, split-hair portions of software rights represent inviolate opportunity and control for the vendor.

   The software of Jazz that HP produced/ported was “supported” by HP, according to its own language. HP added the quotes around support, even for integrated parts of MPE/iX like Apache and Java/iX. If quote-marks support seems a tad below the 3000’s league to you, well, the 3000 wandered in that HP netherworld for more than a decade: not dead, but not alive in the sense of the rest of HP’s enterprise systems. So, even though HP created a special, remote neighborhood for its 3000 software, the unique status of the system isn’t recognized by HPDC. It’s all HP’s IP, even if some of it only runs on a system HP has been urging you to dump for years.

   All of Jazz ought to be free, as free as the Gnu license that controlled the open source where things like Apache and BIND began. In one extreme bit of down-the-rabbit-hole policy, BIND/iX re-hosting is controlled by HP, even while the vendor refused to close a security hole in that software in January.

    BIND might not ever have been worth much to many 3000 customers. But I remember the software starting its 3000 version many miles away from an HP lab. Mark Bixby built it when HP would not, gave it away to the community like good open source. Then HP hired him for 3000 work, taking BIND out of a free market in the process.

  The law gives HPDC the right to do all these things with its IP. Hewlett-Packard isn’t violating any copyright with its re-hosting police action. Saddest of all, the most ardent group of 3000 backers inside HP, the CSY faces and voices, got handed the job of laying down the IP policies — that bad precedent toward good customers.

    There’s no way to calculate how much damage in dollars HP’s business exit has cost 3000 owners. Think a host of hurricanes and you might be estimating on target. You can even subtract the cost of migrations which customers wanted to do, but needed HP’s nudge. It still adds up to millions in forced spending.

    What did all that spending buy the customer in HP’s goodwill, the no-strings donations to ease the exodus away from the vendor’s well-crafted creation? You got HP’s seven-year itch, scratching away at a migration strategy that should have been carved out clearly on the day HP made its 3000 music die.

    The community also gets one copy of MPE/iX to watch at the Computer History Museum, along with a donation of a 3000 that can run version 7.5. The system and its customers deserve more than HPDC’s rummaging under every rock for loose change out of community pockets. You deserve to have your system set free on the day HPDC frees itself from 3000 responsibility.

    Because there’s that old song about a hound dog crying all the time, the vendor’s version insisting that MPE/iX licenses get transferred for a fee. Elvis said that dog never caught a rabbit, and you can’t say that about the 3000 people who’ve been pushed into other work to keep HP jobs. They caught plenty of hares since 1974. But the other HP, that DC crew? Like the King said, they ain’t no friend of mine.

   So say goodbye to all the HP jazz about the 3000. The HP Services team still has some experience to deploy that knows that a 3000 is not just an HP printer. What has left the building altogether is any tangible sense of gratitude for helping Hewlett-Packard create its first business computer business. Thanking customers, like HP has, for that business is polite. The notes which are missing are the HPDC respect for the value in customers’ co-creations — and paying that forward to the community with a forward-thinking coda to the 3000’s song, the ending that it deserves.
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HP Development Company signals HP exit

During a briefing with the OpenMPE board yesterday, chairman Birket Foster noted that the former e3000 business manager Jennie Hou is now working at HP's Enterprise Storage and Servers group. Ross McDonald, Hou's supervisor while at the 3000 division, is reported to be at work on technical projects for HP's Unix servers. Much of the 3000 community at HP has moved away to other parts of HP. This exodus, sparked by the flame-out of 3000-style products at Hewlett-Packard, was kindled by the relatively-new HP Development Company L.P., organized to wrest maximum value from the property rights of HP products.

HPDC is a very different HP from the company you may have known over the past three decades. Changes to any business are inevitable over as many years as Hewlett-Packard has operated. The rate of change and depth of difference can vary, however. The differences represented by HPDC what the migrating 3000 customers, staying with HP on new platforms, must accept and embrace. If a business cannot manage $100 million in revenues per quarter, HPDC can't find a place for it.

And for the homesteaders, that sound you heard this quarter starting with the final HP advisory on the 3000? It was the footsteps of HP, the Hewlett-Packard you knew when you bought your first HP 3000. And like Elvis ending a night of songs, HP was leaving the 3000 building. When HP’s labs finally shut out the MPE lights, some of HP’s last friends of the computer had to leave the vendor’s tough bouncers guarding the door. HPDC now has its hand on the spigot of software for the community.

If you don’t know HPDC, don’t feel left out. This strong arm of HP prefers to remain out of the spotlight, even though every HP top executive carries a job title with the company name attached. It’s a group that polices the intellectual property of Hewlett-Packard. Whatever HP created anywhere, anytime — even the software the vendor improved but did not create — it all carries a price now.

Everyone is entitled to ask to be paid for what they create. In these tough economic days intellectual property, the other IP, is under siege in the markets. Information wants to be free, a mantra that makes more sense when there’s less vendor effort to maintain programs. Software costs pennies on the dollar, compared to the prices vendors collected back when Elvis had already been in his grave for two decades.

It’s now more than three decades since The King shuffled off to a higher jam session, but HP expects no low notes on the IP that it says it controls. Jazz, that rich double-album of software gathered or created by HP’s labs, now falls into the hands of HPDC. That’s why there’s a re-hosting license that HP expects community members to negotiate. No sharing, unless HP approves. HPDC is in charge of keeping the leash tight on every software pup the vendor created.

The reach of HPDC pinned down the sharing of HP's IP in source code as well as freeware created for the 3000 customer. Tomorrow we'll have a look at the impact on the Jazz programs' license program for re-hosting third parties.

OpenMPE moves beyond HP efforts

The OpenMPE advocacy user group ratified its 2009 election results today. The 63 ballots put four directors into seats for the next two years. Birket Foster, Anne Howard and Alan Tibbetts were returned to seats for the volunteer organization. Tony Tibbenham joins the group from a unique perspective, as a board member who has already migrated his HP 3000.

The ballots equalled the number of 2007 votes cast in an election with contested seats. Meanwhile, th contest between which would last longer, Hewlett-Packard's 3000 division or OpenMPE, has been decided as well. 3000 community members will see proposals and action from OpenMPE while HP has retired its lab and division expertise.

"I think it says something that OpenMPE is still here, and HP is not," Foster said today in a conference call to ratify election results. "This is not the only marketplace that HP is in that things are fading out on. IBM, Sun, all the rest of those guys have the same issue: At some point it's not economical for them to run the platform."

OpenMPE has a list of active issues about the 3000 the vendor hasn't addressed, but there are some crucial items the group had to retire from its list. HP 3000s will never get the un-throttling code to release the full power of the N-Class and A-Class processors. HP will never make MPE/iX 7.0 run on the eldest Series 9x7 systems, despite years of asking from OpenMPE's directors. But the additions of programs and processes is impressive, from a rudimentary source code licensing plan to the transfer of HP's 3000 programs from Jazz onto third party servers at Speedware, Client Systems — and soon, OpenMPE's own server.

The group started with a "Gang of Six" issues, with a deadline of 2006, crucial to continued 3000 use:

1. Remove or publish passwords for MPE-unique system utilities no later than end of 2006.
2. Enable MPE license transfers, upgrades and hardware re-configuration (add/upgrade processors) to continue after 2006; for emulator usage, changing user license levels, acquiring used e3000 systems.
3. Allow non-HP access to and escrow of MPE source code
4. Allow third-party creation of an MPE emulator
5. Enable third-party HP e3000 software support after 2006
6. Enable availability of all public documentation after 2006

Numbers 2, 3, 5 and 6 are a reality today after five years of OpenMPE effort. The passwords present a distinct problem because some utilities are identical to HP-UX server programs. As for Number 4, the MPE emulator, work is proceeding on a 3000 hardware emulator project, and emulator features exist in MPUX and AMXW products from Ordina and Speedware, respectively.

The four directors from today's election join Donna Hofmeister, Matt Perdue, Tracy Johnson, John Wolff and Walter Murray to make up the nine-member board. This month the group will meet by conference call to decide what's on its 2009 agenda. Jeff Bandle of HP still has some answers to issues the board considers active, so a meeting with HP's OpenMPE liasion is in the future.

In the meantime, e3000 business manager Jennie Hou has moved on to join the Enterprise Storage and Servers group at HP, moving from the HP Services sector where HP 3000 activities were based for the past several years. HP's actions, steered by R&D Lab Manager Ross McDonald for the last three years, were hemmed in by the HP Development Company L.P., which calls the strategy plays for the entire corporation. With HPDC at the reins, controlling HP's intellectual property, the open transfer of MPE/iX and 3000 work was never going to come off with as much cooperation as when HP retired its previous server, the HP 1000.

"I am just wishing that it could have been as pleasant as it was with the 1000," said board member Alan Tibbetts, who was essential to the 1000's IP transfer to the customers and user groups. HP 1000 operating system code for RTE made its way into the Interex user group repositories during the earliest part of this decade. OpenMPE made its attempt to let the older HP school the 3000 division.

"At one point, OpenMPE had Don Pottenger of HP communicating with [HP's OpenMPE liaison] Mike Paivinen," Tibbets said, "going over the way that we had done it on the 1000. The major difference between now and then is the structure of HP at the time" HP left the HP 1000 market.

HP opened a patents division in 2004 which became the HP Development Company after HP sent former CEO Carly Fiorina packing. Future advocacy efforts — for any of HP's products which may see a sunset in the corporate price list — must deal with the shadow efforts of HPDC. As an example of how broad HPDC LP is established at Hewlett-Packard, every one of its press releases and Web pages carries the organization's name in the copyright information, and all HP officers are listed as employees of HPDC. We'll have more on what advocacy groups like OpenMPE are up against in tomorrow's editorial.

There are patterns to a vendor's strategy for its proprietary server products, such as the HP-UX systems, "and I think [the 3000] is just the first one that HP pushed through the chute," said OpenMPE chair Foster. "It was pushed because it was part of the merger process with Compaq, and also because it was part of HP's need to do discovery — because they had never done one of these [exits] in HP's living memory."