Top Stories of 2006, Part 1
December 26, 2006
It's a week of rest and recovery for many HP 3000 shops, but some of our readers are still at work completing migrations by year's end, or finishing off year-end financial reports. The approach of year's end spurs us to select the top 12 stories of the past year, covering both migration and homesteading resources.
1. Most recently we heard from HP that its Large Files Dataset project is being retired, even after the patch was tested and approved for general release. LFDS is likely to be the last big-scale project HP undertook for MPE/iX, IMAGE and the HP 3000.
2. OpenMPE earned its first revenues from HP this year, when the engineers attached to the advocacy group eaned a consulting fee for reviewing HP's MPE/iX source code build process. Customers still await the release of source code and those build processes. HP's ability to use the veteran community technical expertise of the OpenMPE "virtual lab" was a milestone in the history of the advocacy group.
3. Perhaps most important to the enterprise revenues in the HP financial quarter just ending, HP demonstrated that its architecture and integration with virtualization has finally come of age for the 3000 customer, with the advent of the low-end to mid-range 3600 and 6600 models of Integrity servers. The momentum HP was gaining with the fifth generation of the Itanium architecture might have sparked some rock-tossing; at the same time IBM hired an analyst to cast doubts about the future of Integrity. We've been waiting for this watershed — where the Itanium servers offer a better value as well as higher performance than PA-RISC — to appear on the HP 3000's migration path. After all, the HP Unix solution has no other hardware set to fly toward than Integrity.