MPE upgrade carries bonus gigabytes
October 6, 2006
HP is offering an upgrade to the world of HP 3000 disks in the form of a revised version of MPE.
Some MPE revisions bring subtle changes. But none of them, until now, have increased the available storage space on the 3000's boot drive. Moving from MPE/iX 6.5 to 7.5 will do that, because HP's final version of MPE recognizes space greater than 4 GB on the system's startup volume.
HP engineered the change for maximum flexibility, according to users and vendors doing upgrades these days. HP's early discussions about the design would have made the liberated space only available for a user volume.
HP found a way to restrict the files that needed to be in the 4 GB section of drives while leaving the remainder of the space available transparently. For customers whose LDEV 1 is an 18 GB device — and it should be, since those are the newer generation of HP's smallest 3000 drives — recovering those gigabytes could be a way to induce an upgrade.
Customers get the extra space back which they paid for on their drives without extra hassles like an INSTALL. The retesting involved with upgrading needs to have an obvious benefit, for some 3000 customers.
No OS upgrade for MPE up to now has ever had the potential to quadruple the amount of free
space on the 3000. Even a 918LX with a 9GB disk drive as LDEV 1,
and after the update can use all of the greater than 4GB space. "Automagically," as some vets like to say, without that INSTALL>
HP's 3000 group has delivered something very rare: an OS upgrade that doesn’t take up more space than the one it replaces.
HP's also worked to give "big disks" the ability to work with MPE/iX, up to half a terabyte, with 300 GB volumes available for use with the 3000.