Ecometry migration steps beyond HP-UX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3000s to depart Longs after long life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will PCI standards kick 3000s out of service?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IBM, packaged app to replace 3000 system

Not many HP 3000 migration customers choose IBM's iSeries systems, but the platform notched a convert this month from a 25-year site. GNM Financial Services, a Culver City, California-based services firm, announced plans to replace its HP 3000 and applications with the S2K Enterprise for Distribution suite. The software runs on a low-end iSeries server, a Power 520.

The replacement software rolled in as a result of work by IBM reseller VAI, which released a Customer Relation Management (CRM) system last fall tuned to work with the i Series and its integrated database. IBM has promoted the iSeries as a logical next step for 3000 sites accustomed to the MPE/IMAGE database integration. But few converts have been announced since the IBM efforts began in 2002.

GNM's IT director Pam Tucker, who was a 3000 NewsWire subscriber for a few years after HP announced its 3000 exit, issued a statement for the VAI press release that said the company needed a newer solution with a more comprehensive future. She described their 3000 as "aging." The IBM press inflated that assessment to "archaic." But newer apps to replace aged 3000 software is an old story in this community.

The news in this report is the win for IBM. Sometimes a transfer to Big Blue's integrated business platform results from a selection of an application. Other cases are triggered by a trickle-down from a mother-ship IT shop. Tucker said GNM did a thorough search for replacement software. The reseller reports that GNM wanted a solution designed for the i Series.

"We understood that GNM and Mytel needed a technology solution to replace our aging HP 3000," Tucker said in her statement. The press release added that the new application promises to provide

... Access to the real-time information required to improve customer service and eliminate our outdated paper tracking system. S2K for Distribution has achieved this goal, placing key information literally at our fingertips. Specifically, VAI's CRM software, with its centralized database, allows us to see and understand all customer interactions in a way that was simply not possible before.

A modern CRM solution isn't available off the shelf for the HP 3000. Meanwhile, IBM has maintained its support for the i Series even in the face of an AS/400-Unix consolidation of the server line last year. (IBM calls the merged platform the IBM Power System, named after the core POWER chips at the heart of Unix and OS/400 solutions.) GNM describes itself as a supplier to small, independently owned office supply companies. The GNM services include "locating of merchandise; arranging for shipment of merchandise; invoice processing; financing of accounts receivable; collection of accounts receivable, and consumer assistance."

GNM must integrate data from an allied company, Mytel, one which didn't pop up in our NewsWire database. It's possible that IBM or the i Series is already installed at Mytel. We're waiting on a return call from Tucker to learn more about GNM's new migration project, and how the i Series became an important component of a replacement solution.

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."

Size up maximum drive capacity

Hewlett-Packard created a forward-looking feature for the HP 3000 before its lab retired. One of the biggest enhancements gave MPE/iX the ability to use drives sized up to 512GB. Getting this size of drive to work involves going outside of the 3000's foundation, both literally as well as strategically.

External disc drives supply storage beyond the 73GB devices which were fitted inside the HP 3000 chassis. This Hewlett-Packard part numbered A6727A was an off-the-cuff answer from Client Systems to the "how big" question. Client Systems built HP 3000s with this part installed while the company was North America's only 3000 distributor. But nothing bigger ever came off a factory line before HP stopped building 3000s in 2003.

Outside of HP's official channel, however, a drive twice as large is installed on a N-Class. Two, in fact. Matt Perdue reports that his Hill Country Technologies site boasts a N-Class with a pair of 146GB drives inside. The Seagate ST3146855LC spins at 15,000 RPM, too, a faster rate than anything HP ever put in a 3000. Perdue said he picked up his drives from online reseller CDW.com.

Older 3000s, however, need single-ended drives for internal use, according to Allegro Consulting's Donna Hofmeister. She says the 3000's drive size limit is controlled by two factors: internal versus external, and HP "blessed," or off-the-shelf specified.

Hofmeister, who joined Allegro's customer support operations after many years at Longs Drugs managing 3000s, said the Longs systems accessed disk clusters, called LUNs, of many hundreds of GB.

When I was at Longs, I was able to effortlessly mount a very large LUN on one of my systems. I wish I could remember how big it actually was, but I reckon it must have been several hundred GBs. The LUN would have been comprised of many physical mechanisms -- but the system never saw that level of detail.

The "blessed" question was debated from the late '90s onward between HP engineers and 3000 consultants and veterans. HP would only support disc devices that passed its extraordinary reliability tests. Nobody was surprised that only HP-branded discs ever got this blessing for the 3000. Once disk storage got inexpensive, drives from the same manufacturers who sourced to HP gained a following with the veterans.

"There’s the whole supported/blessed/holy aspect to the question," Hofmeister said. "[The Client Systems] answer is technically correct.  On the other hand, my current favorite MPE system to torture has a 400-plus GB drive attached to it, and it works great. I certainly wouldn’t classify this disc as falling into the supported/blessed/holy category."

HP released patches to MPE/iX 7.5 to make this possible. The project the vendor called "Large Disk" gives 3000 users "the ability to initialize an MPE/iX disk volume of up to 512 GB on SCSI-2 compliant disks. SCSI-2 Disks that are larger than 512GB will be truncated at the 512GB limit and the space beyond 512GB will not be usable by the MPE/iX Operating System or any user applications running under MPE."

HP started the engineering to release the patches for the 6.5 and 7.0 versions of MPE/iX, but never finished testing for those more common versions of MPE/iX. The 7.5 patches, available for download from HP's ITRC, are

MPEMXT1        FSCHECK.MPEXL.TELESUP
MPEMXT2        [ALT|LIST|NEW][ACCT|GROUP]
MPEMXT3        SCSI Disk Driver Update
MPEMXT4        SSM Optimization (>87GB)
MPEMXT7        DISCFREE.PUB.SYS
MPEMXU3        REPORT
MPEMXU6        CATALOG.PUB.SYS
MPEMXU7        CIERR.PUB.SYS, CICATERR.PUB.SYS

HP sells a disk of 300GB that might qualify for "blessing" if the labs had ever put the device through the 3000 tests. But the vendor has always erred on the side of caution about larger drives, even in an era when disk had become cheaper than $2 a GB. HP's Jim Hawkins offered a white paper on Large Disk that advised caution for using 3000 disks larger than 36GB.

MPE/iX transaction throughput increases when MPE is allowed to spread IO across disks. Even though newer disks are faster than older disks, there are limits to disk speed and bus speed which must be taken into account. Moving from, say, nine 2GB disks to one 18GB disk will often create a Disk IO bottleneck. For best performance we recommend that the number of MPE LDEVs never be reduced -- if one has nine 2GB disks then they should be replaced with nine 18GB disks to ensure no loss of throughput.

The other aspect of HP's blessing a larger disk is tied to HP's support of a 3000. But as of the end of next year, HP's support exit will eliminate that issue. HP never did support the full drive bus speed for the larger disks. 3000s get only Ultra-160 throughput, while HP-UX supports Ultra-320 on the very same devices.

Those larger disks offer a significant value over the blessed drives. CDW sells the 146GB device for $256. The HP drive with half that capacity sells for $273. It's important to order a parallel SCSI version (LC) when purchasing a drive. SAS drives are replacing the LC drives and cost much less.

Keep 3000-Mac emulation up to date

Macs aren't in wide use as HP 3000 clients, but the popular publishing and Web design computers do work for a number of 3000 community sites. One such is the US Cat Fancier's Association (CFA), where manager Connie Sellito needs an emulation program built for the Mac's modern-day OS X.

We do not have the  option of moving the Mac applications to a PC -- our publications (Web site and printed materials) department is firmly entrenched in the Mac camp. Makes for an interesting day!

The most straightforward solution comes from Minisoft. Its MS92 software, a longtime competitive solution to WRQ's Reflection, is designed and maintained for Macintoshes. Sellito's says that MS92 "is what we're using on the newer Macs. Excellent product."

But Reflection's scripting is entrenched at CFA. The emulator long ago lost its development team, in the same way that the WRQ brand name has disappeared into its new owner, Attachmate.

WRQ was once the largest supplier of HP 3000-related software, if you counted individual licenses on PCs. The company was acquired by Attachmate in 2005. Reflection lives on in a Windows version. The company also pointed to a Web-based solution that requires an intermediate server.

Melissa Liton, a PR rep for Attachmate, reports that "Reflection for HP is a Windows only product. However, Attachmate’s Reflection for the Web product — a Java-based “thin-client” that runs in the browser — does support Mac and is a great HP emulator."

The diagram at left shows the configuration needed to run Reflection for the Web. Adager's Alfredo Rego, one of the 3000+Mac advocates in the community, has also noted that running Reflection for HP is possible inside an emulator such as VMWare or Parallels. He's tested the latter, which recently proved to be more secured against a Windows malware exploit than its competitor. (That's right: Macs could get hit by a Windows virus with older versions of VMWare.)

No matter how you solve for giving Macs 3000 terminal access with Reflection, an in-between step adds complexity. When WRQ dropped Mac support late in the 1990s, the Mac was a niche solution in IT. Times have changed: A recent study showed that 68 percent of companies surveyed plan to add Macs to their IT mix. Minisoft has hung on long enough to see the world expand.

Economy presses 3000 vets out of work

Manufacturing firms are cutting through rough waters in 2009, rocked by the same waves that are sending bank stocks below $2 and removing clerks from retail stores in staff cutbacks. The Parker Hannifin Corp. in Cleveland, Ohio had to make cuts recently which sent 22-year veteran Edna Houston to the unemployment ranks. Most of us know someone who's been furloughed, laid off or some other term for less busy than they want to be day-to-day.

Houston took to her blog last week to talk about the steps that her employer, which has used HP 3000s for those two-plus decades, took before cutting staff:

They have explored every possibility to prevent layoffs. Temporary workers and part time staff have already been let go. Remaining personnel have been mandated to use their accrued vacation time down to below 100 hours. Last quarter we were required to take five days off unpaid. This next quarter we are required to take 10 days off unpaid. Merit increases have been postponed for 18 months. Now they have offered workers incentives if they will voluntarily retire or voluntarily quit. But make no mistake about it, layoffs are inevitable. The recession is just too deep.

There was a time not long ago when being idled was an HP 3000 expert's unique situation, unless they learned other skills. But the retreat from business expansion is pushing a much broader range of IT veteran onto the unemployment rolls. We only have fear itself to fear — but the first step toward fearing only fear is to look reality in the eye. The second step is to tell what has happened to you, and then network.

Learning something new and needed might be a third step. Just today my sister-in-law reported that she's passed her tests to become a Ohio State certified Nurse's Aid. The job couldn't be more different from her decade-plus in payables and receiveables. Her former employer was another manufacturing company in the Midwest taking a dip in its business.

Learning something new in the IT skill set is one of the ways to float upward in the downward undertow of today's business currents. This may not be news to some community members, but online training in complementary IT skills — something related to what you know but in a new area of opportunity — is one strategy to follow while you're looking. (No implicit endorsement in the link there to Skillsoft, but you get the idea.) Train from your home office (that's what we independents call it when we leave traditional employment) and put that broadband connection to good use.

Even as the Fed chairman predicts things will turn upward next year, consumer finance TV star Suze Orman thinks it will be another six years before the tide rises instead of ebbs. Nobody knows for sure. However, being unique in your skill set really can help in finding a place to land. The HP 3000 customers who aren't shedding jobs so quickly still rely on the system, even more so now that capital expenditures are being reduced. Add the fact that 3000 experience is becoming rare and you might have a formula for finding work. Houston's situation is new and she's begun a campaign of getting the word out without remorse or blame. Facebook, Linked In: Such resources help you build out a personal network, the asset that can turn the tide for employment future.

Washington colleges continue study of migration

This week's issue of the Olympic College's newspaper The Olympian includes news of the HP 3000. In specific, the paper reports about the fate of systems which support admissions, registration, financial aid and graduation tracking. This nearly-total range of college operations relies on an HP 3000 the college has been working to replace since 2003. In fact, more than 30 colleges continue to count on this 3000 that college IT directors like Jack Hanson say will be hard to maintain and find parts for after 2010.

Projects move more slowly in the academic world, a fact that could be even more true at the Bellingham,
Washington community college. Olympic College is part of the Washington Community College Consortium (WCCC), a group of schools which operated HP 3000s that were destined to become a single .NET server. Hewlett-Packard first earned the approval to do the migration, with Transoft to perform the work. In the fall of 2003 we reported:

The deal with the Washington colleges migrates 34 colleges' HP 3000s into a centralized data center to be run by the colleges’ Center for Information Systems (CIS). The applications written in COBOL II on the 3000s will become AcuCOBOL applications under Microsoft’s .NET, said Transoft CEO Paul Holland, after about 18 months of migration work between Transoft and HP Services.

The Olympian and the reports to the Washington State Student Services Commission & Councils tell the rest of the story. Plans for a move away from an in-house system failed, so HP had to back away from the engagement and settle up on what couldn't be finished. The colleges still intend to run on another platform by 2010, The Olympian reports, the end of HP's support. One bit of the delay might stem from what the colleges hoped to convert: reports written in Protos, a unique mix of COBOL and fourth generation language.

Sure enough, since the colleges are public entities with open reporting, you can locate online documents on the 2004 schedule of migration and progress report, the options assessment more than four years later (PDF file, see page 7), and now the news that the colleges want to move forward after "a $14 million rehosting project was cancelled last year." The project was big enough to involve services in Atlanta, London and India. Not to mention the oversight from Washington's colleges.

That migration's 2003 target platform, Windows, was influenced by nearby Microsoft (perhaps donating software) and HP Service's desire to put up a win for the .NET solution to show 3000 customers. Protos, however, can be a knotty piece of software to unravel into another language, since the vendor has closed down operations for many years now. Protos distinguished itself by compiling into COBOL, but the gap between its reports and .NET — the latter created 10 years after development ended on Protos — may have been too wide to span.

Then there's this bit of information from an early draft of the 2004 report: "HP's contractual obligation is to transfer 400 reports from the current systems. This leaves a great many reports needing to be developed by CIS and/or campus resources."

There's little to be gained by now in finding fingers to point, but something can be learned here. Understanding how to move code to a new platform requires an understanding of the 3000's aspects even more than expertise on the target, according to several migration services firms in the 3000 community. Even a vendor-assisted migration might require significant in-house resources to finish a mission-critical rehosting like the one at WCCC.

The migration could now carry the WCCC's 3000 apps anywhere, according to the latest report. Collegiate Project Services is contracted "to do an assessment of the needs of each college campus through a variety of questionnaires and one-on-one interviews," according to the Olympian's story. Colleges are having more input this time around than during what was called Re-hosting, but was actually rewriting. The effort is now called "Go Forward," to leave room for whatever solution seems best. One big difference this time around — the colleges are looking at replacement software. Rewriting is still on the table according to a resource manager at Olympic College. But keeping that Protos-type element in mind might make a strong case to try to replace.

In about a month, the assessment will be completed along with a recommendation, with the results distributed to all 34 colleges by May. This will all be in advance of the work to be done, like testing a replacement set of applications or plunging into another rewrite. WCCC figured to have HP's migration project complete by 2005. Considering that migrations take about 18 months on average to finish, the schools will only be five years behind their plans.

Missed deadlines and canceled projects are all routine steps in making a migration, even though there have been many sites which have skipped both of these snarls on the path away from the 3000. But the lessons to be taken away from these schools are fundamental to understanding the challenge of leaving the platform. The older the application's history, the more business logic must be moved, and the fewer IT developers will be on hand to help understand. Factor in key software that's not supported any longer and you get both a hurdle as well as a reason to make changes, like moving away from a language like Protos.

Since the Olympian's story is online, it's available for comments, and one HP 3000 veteran has already offered an alternative. John Ryrie of TAG Software in the UK said that maybe getting some inexpensive replacement 3000s, parts and non-HP MPE support might be a smarter course to follow.

Perhaps another option for IT to consider would be to look to companies who supply second-user equipment, especially given the current shortage of cash. In my opinion there will be HP 3000s around for a long time to come, as well as operating system support from companies other than Hewlett-Packard. If it works...

That's not exactly helpful for almost three dozen colleges who have already agreed on migration and financed their intention. But with N-Class servers on the market for as little as $4,000 these days, standby hardware and a good contract for third party support seem a small backup investment for these interim homesteaders.

Lufthansa flies off to SAP replacement

Many HP 3000 customers who migrate do so onto lower-priced alternatives. User reports are rife with stories of Eloquence replacing TurboIMAGE, or programs which are emulated with few rewrites onto Windows systems, using a tool like AMXW (deployed at financials giant ING) or Ordina's MPUX. But some 3000 sites have succeeded at making the SAP behemoth work in place of MPE/iX in-house-written apps.

That's the report from Lufthansa Technik Airmotive Ireland, where IT manager Joe Farrell has managed the last of the transitions away from the HP 3000. SAP has been the target platform for the aircraft manufacturing firm ever since HP announced it would exit the 3000 community. Now the last 3000 app is being transferred to work on Intel-based servers. Lufthansa uses servers from Hewlett-Packard, no less.

"Incidentally, we host SAP on an entirely Intel-based platform (originally NetServers, but more recently Proliants)," Farrell reported. "There’s HP loyalty for you!"

"We’ve replaced all but one of our HP 3000 applications," Farrell said. "The last remaining one, a custom application for Contract Billing/Invoicing, is being redeveloped onto a new platform."

Lufthansa turned to SAP's high-level Advanced Business Application Programming language to rewrite the billing/invoicing app. ABAP is positioned as SAP's tool for its Web Application Server, part of its NetWeaver platform for building business applications. ABAP, which harkens back to the German roots of SAP's designs, has a syntax that is said to be similar to COBOL. The German name for ABAP translates into "general report creation processor." Farrell reports of his final migrated 3000 app:

We developed it in-house over 17 years ago, mainly in PowerHouse, with a bit of COBOL for the more challenging processing. It also uses Fantasia for producing customer-friendly output. And, needless to say, it uses the trusty TurboIMAGE database for the data.

We have re-written it, again in-house, as a custom module for our SAP platform. It was developed using the ABAP language, and SAP-Script for formatting the output. This was the most logical (no pun intended) platform for it — as our ERP system, including Financials, are all SAP-based at this stage. So now the users will have a single front-end GUI, and the data is integrated in a single Oracle database.

Migration splits duties of dropping, testing

    In what’s becoming a proven strategy for large migrations, Speedware and ING Australia split the work between revising applications, known as “code drops,” and creating and managing the test suites and testing of the re-hosted software. The large-scale project was completed in 2008.

    “It was a pretty substantive project,” said Andrea McCarley, the deployment manager for the migration project ING called Chrysalis. “We had six streams going at one point, with 20-30 in-house staff and other third party vendors involved as well.” Even at that size of staffing, the project was occupying only about 10-15 percent of ING’s IT staff, which at the time was more than 300 professionals.

    Speedware’s marketing director Chris Koppe said another motivation for ING was to reduce the number of third party applications needed for a production system. While some new vendors have been introduced to make Chrysalis a reality, the third-party elements were reduced from more than 40 to less than 20, he said.

    ING counted on some Unix expertise among its IT staff at the time of choosing HP-UX, but not a lot. McCarley said Speedware employed its AMXW migration tool, “but HP-UX was definitely a new environment to us, and particularly AMXW, which is proprietary to Speedware. But it provides a lot of functionality for us — it’s kind of the grease between the operating system and the application code, so we didn’t have to rewrite specific utilities.”

    The time difference between Speedware’s Montreal labs and the ING operations is more than a business day, but having Speedware staff onsite in Australia helped. Some Speedware calls had to be made at midnight Eastern time to catch ING before the end of its business day. The two companies found a way to make the clock work for them.

    “In some ways you got a 24-hour cycle, because people could work on things here and then hand it off to [Speedware],” McCarley said, and then Montreal would work on the fixes overnight, so we’d get them pretty quickly.”

   The project was the largest that ING had undertaken, even if the end result was the same applications moved to another HP platform. “You were lifting up the hood and swapping out all the pieces, so at the end of the day you had the same car doing the same thing, but almost every component was changed,” McCarley said. The challenge was in the technology changes, since the objective was to make the user experience seamless.

    The tech changes occurred against the history of reliability and comfort with HP 3000s. “But everyone knew they couldn’t go forward in an unsupported environment,” McCarley said, “so we had to step and get acclimated to the new technology and the new platform. If HP was willing to support it indefinitely, no one would be willing to undertake this large a migration project.”

    Evolving, everyday-use business logic was making the migration during the project, rather than static systems. An analysis revealed programs and menus no longer used, streamlining away elements that didn’t need to be shifted onto the HP-UX system. “There was no point in paying for migrating something that was no longer being used,” McCarley said.

    After functionality testing took place in Montreal, the full environment was actively tested in Australia. A unique number of interfaces connected the systems, McCarley said, so complete testing had to take place at the customer site, including integration testing, user acceptance testing, operability testing, performance testing, and “a whole phase just around batch processing, to get it right for our environment.”

    Speedware’s staffers “were committed to the project and definitely there when you picked up the phone,” McCarley said. “When you’re working out an issue in the code, you don’t always know if it’s in the code or in the environment. So there was a lot of collaboration to figure out what root causes were the issue. Then either they would fix it, or we would fix it.”

    Stepping away from TurboIMAGE gave ING a chance to embrace Eloquence as the new database for the production environment. “It certainly made the data migration straightforward,” McCarley said. Eloquence indexing will enable ING to move away from Omnidex in the HP-UX environment, removing another third party element.

    ING was pleased with the results of its project, praising Speedware’s partnership model. Kulakowski said the ING project is “evidence that large organizations can undertake a well-planned and automated modernization project to migrate to a new, stable platform, providing increased business agility and significant cost savings.”