After securing new dates in the same location, the Greater Houston Regional User Group (GHRUG) has postponed its September MPE/iX conference. Group president Richard Pringle cited a lack of time to prepare the kind of meeting that a 3000 community in transition deserves.

The group of volunteers needs more time, according to the GHRUG statement .

Our HP 3000 Conference scheduled for September 14-15, 2007, is being postponed.  "We have always wanted to offer the highest quality MPE/iX International conference," said president Richard Pringle. "In a community with such a wide range of transition and training needs, creating the best possible conference required more time than we first estimated. Our key sponsors and committee members remain fully engaged for our new conference dates. New programs and events are in process today for Spring, March 14 and 15 of 2008 — a year with critical impact for the 3000 community. Your patience and participation is appreciated."

Even though the HP 3000 mailing list doesn't even boast 600 members, it's a barometer of what the installed base is thinking about. In the last week or so the list has been recounting history, looking back at accomplishments that seem crude and small in today's light.

They were no such thing during the 1970s and 1980s, when the minicomputer was winning share away from mainframes. HP led the way with interactive computing and a bundled IMAGE database. The latter was a result of the US government ruling against IBM, one that forced Big Blue to break up its offerings. At the same time, HP brought out a business server with a database wired into the operating and file systems.

IBM had to break out its software and hardware businesses as a result of the Federal decree. The HP 3000 got its opening to give programmers the power to create their own applications by driving an award-winning database. Datamation, long since passed in the market but a force in the 1970s, crowned IMAGE with the prize in 1977. HP only began to bundle it in 1976.

John Dunlop, who operates the fine 3000links.com Web page, started a thread on the 3000 list not long ago about the days of paper tape computing. Technology that goes back at least to the time of the 3000's inception. Dunlop outlined his challenges with IBM's 360 mainframe and its Job Control Language (JCL) cards. In part, he wrapped up by saying,

Paper tape also had nightmare qualities of its own. It seemed that it was always just as you got close to the end of a complicated program that the tape would break and you would have to start again. However, it was a slight improvement on the cards.

I expect others have similar nostalgic stories. I for one would enjoy hearing them.  Perhaps Ron Seybold could have a nostalgia corner somewhere.

Consider that corner to be right here, in the comments section below.

The platform most often picked to replace HP 3000 missions? That would be Windows, thanks to the "billions and billions," as Carl Sagan would say, of Windows desktops out there.

But what if that sea of piano-note-laden splash screens didn't surge up to sing "Microsoft?" Supposing the trend tilted toward Linux on desktops? How would the 3000-to-Windows migration choice measure up, if Linux gets critical mass on desktops, too?

Linux already powers much of the Internet. HP 3000 experts are reaching out to the Little Penguin That Could for migration server choices, but not anywhere near as often as HP's Unix, or Windows. HP's worldwide director of open-source and Linux marketing, Doug Small, said that the mass will become as critical as your missions for Linux on desks. This year, too.

"Of course," you say, "he's the director of marketing for HP's Linux. What else would he say?" The real question is what will Small do. In the face of a more complex and largely-on-the-sidelines Vista release, HP is likely to release a retail line of PCs bundled with Linux desktop operating systems. HP is already pre-loading Linux on desktops for 37 Latin American countries. (Who knew there were so many?) Retail. Talk about institutionalizing Linux in customers' minds.

It's a stretch to imagine that 100 million Windows desktops will roll to Linux in a hurry. But consider that a manager of HP 3000s and the desktops must roll these systems over every three years, to keep up with Windows' demands. On any of those rolls, a low-cost, high-function Linux could take over. Microsoft knows this, and markets against Linux with vigor approaching desperation.

HP 3000 managers, even the women, are "belt-and-suspender guys," to use a phrase from the 1980s. They are accustomed to knowing that whatever can go wrong, will go wrong — and being enough of an IT pro to recover. Quickly.

Oh, that the Internet's infrastructure should be so well engineered. On Tuesday a few blocks of San Francisco were without power, intermittently. Within minutes, massive chunks of the Internet was knocked off the wires and wireless channels. Big companies and famous sites. Good Morning Silicon Valley noted the popular sites that were shut down:

LiveJournal and Second Life went dead, AdBrite dimmed, Craigslist became unlisted, the 1Up gaming network went down, Facebook turned blank, Six Apart couldn't get it together, and Yelp was rendered silent.

The outage even hit our NewsWire offices, thousands of miles away, because we host with Six Apart for this blog. Our content is backed up locally, daily, but our performing platform sank into shadow for more than three worrisome hours. Only a story about the blackouts from an InfoWorld site — just a few blocks from the outage — allayed our concerns. Good Morning Silicon Valley noted that

A good-size chunk of San Francisco was powerless for several hours during the middle of the business day, including hosting service 365 Main, which powers many of the Web's most popular sites and which boasts of doubly redundant backup in case of blackouts

HP offered its latest disaster recovery solution in an entertaining video shown at last month's HP Technology Forum. Disaster recovery (DR) can become your only job if something so simple as power gets interrupted. Many HP 3000 veterans now offer this service to the community.

HP's third fiscal quarter closes in less than a week, and the company can point to a stock run-up of almost 50 percent in share price over the last 12 months. It's been a rate of rise to take pride in, at least among HP's employees and officers and the most loyal of customers. Like those who are staying with HP as they make their transition from the 3000. Choosing HP's Unix or HP servers is no slam-dunk sale for your vendor.

But even that performance is being out-paced by Apple today. The company dropped the "Computer" from its name last year, even though its Macintosh systems now rank at Number 4 in the US PC market share. HP often reminds us of its Number 1 ranking in servers of all kinds. PCs, of course, represent so many more computers.

Today Apple announced its quarterly earnings (profits up 73 percent) with news about the opening four weeks of sales of its iPhone. To some eyes, the iPhone is Apple's latest Mac. On this evening, the computer line that isn't Windows-based — but runs Windows alongside Apple's Unix, OS X — is sold by a company capitalized at $129 billion. HP's market cap is $118 billion today. Profit per employee is $45,000 at HP, and $173,000 at Apple.

And Apple's stock run-up? 124 percent per share in the last year, not counting the $13-a-share bump tonight on the iPhone news.

How Apple spins its profit from so few employees might be a trick only a BMW-grade company can perform. But HP can tout its Number 1 status in the whole of the industry. Getting to Number 1 obviously takes a lot more headcount. That musters the clout to deliver HP's Monday salvo, when Hewlett-Packard offered $1.6 billion to buy data center automation software company Opsware.

Joerg Groessler, creator of breakthrough backup programs for HP 3000s, has died at age 55. The German computer scientist and creator of Online Backup, and the first released version of Backpack/3000, passed away quietly in the night of July 23, ending a battle with a brain tumor which had been diagnosed earlier this year.

Groessler celebrated life in his final months in the community, working until his final two weeks on development at ORBiT Software, the company he founded in the early 1980s. Stories describing his transition suite at the Clairmont assisted living facility where he spent his last days included a 62-inch flat-screen monitor to program on and communicate, fed by 2 MB Internet pipe, "because I don't have time to wait."

Groessler was more than an expert programmer, by accounts from community colleagues as well as co-workers in the ORBiT lab. Close friend and business colleague Jane Copeland, who knew him since his seminal HP market days of the 1970s and was in continual contact with Groessler and his family to the very last, said the man's brilliance was apparent.

"He was a genius," said the founder of API Software, a networking solutions provider to the HP 3000 community and beyond. Even while he was continuing lab work for ORBiT, Groessler contributed "very valuable work for us" during his final year, Copeland said.

Mark Klein, ORBiT's lab software manager for more than a decade and a 3000 star who still develops for the company as an independent, said that Groessler's design of Backup — which has stood up through three distinct generations of MPE, from CISC through RISC and beyond — was both an industry breakthrough and prescient.

"He wasn't the typical [lab director] who rides herd over his masses," Klein said. "He told us what he wanted and let us loose to create it." ORBiT's labs, under Groessler's direction, grew to include a star caliber roster of developers including Stan Sieler, Jason Goertz, Paul Taffel, Jacques van Damme and Klein. "A Joerg Groessler ORBiT was a lot of fun to work at," Klein said.

Every HP 3000 contains an ODBC database link tool. ODBCLink/SE was engineered by MBFA, then bundled in with the HP 3000 operating system. The software has been available since MPE/iX 6.0, so that covers close to a decade's worth of releases. MB Foster has offered an upgrade to the 3000 community to expand the tool's power, an upgrade at a discount.

Keeping ODBCLink/SE running isn't complex, but it can require more than just keeping the 3000 plugged in to your building's power source. You have to keep up with some patches if things change in your environment. Current HP support customers can get updates, online, for the bundled software.

On the HP 3000 Internet newsgroup, one 3000 user was trying to keep the link tool from hanging up. HP's Cathlene McRae, Senior Response Center Engineer, offered a few solutions to the problem.

If you are getting a number of hangs from the ODBCLink/SE driver you may need  to do one of the following:

1) Update the version of the ODBCLink/SE driver. The current version is g04.05. Run odbcutse.odbcse.sys to discover your current version.

It was two years ago this week that the HP 3000 community learned about the Interex user group's vanishing act. The technical and social resource for HP computer users went offline with no notice to the group's HP World sponsors, magazine and show advertisers, volunteers or members, leaving more than $4 million in unpaid bills and long-term debts.

After 24 months, the only remaining asset worth pursuit — the programs in the group's Contributed Software Library — remains in limbo. Members and sponsors have not seen their bank accounts reimbursed for booth reservations, membership dues or sponsor monies, not to mention the unpaid bills to hotels across the country or HP's loss (well over $100,000, for those who are counting.)

It was 60 years ago that Sgt. Pepper taught his band to play (the 20 in that Beatles lyric, plus the 40 since the song's release), but the song of Interex played only about half as long. HP 3000 customers founded the group in earnest in the middle 1970s, led by system managers working to find a way to maximize their investment in HP 3000s. Hewlett-Packard engineers used those users to tune the HP 3000 product offerings, often by repair of the releases after they were already in the field.

Guy Smith, a contributing writer for the 3000 NewsWire in our earliest issues of 1995, posted a note in that week of 2005, noting that "It is no longer an HP World."

It was a marketplace of names.

That is the sentence one man suggested for opening a history of the HP 3000. Birket Foster of MB Foster has offered it to me in many discussions, chats when the topic became, "When are you going to write that book?"

Birket is one of those names, among the more unique of the cast members which helped produce the HP 3000 marketplace. Others come to mind like Alfredo, Vladimir and the more common-sounding Bob or Fred. (If you're keeping score, the last names are Rego, Volokh, Green and White, the founders of Adager, VEsoft, Robelle, and IMAGE respectively.) That quartet of creators of database tools, a turbo-charged MPE and 3000's award-winning database — their names come to mind first.There are many more, uncommon monikers like J.P., Gilles, Eugene, and a Potter from Quasar who offered the 3000's first QUIZ. 

However, before nearly all of those names rose in your community's ranks — in fact, 35 years ago this summer — were Hewlett and Packard, and the company named for two men who didn't really believe a business computer was in HP's business interest. Despite their reservations, several years of work on the first model of your system led to the summer of 1972, when the HP 3000 was already running late, beset with hardware problems.

Our archives here in the NewsWire offices now include a letter to the first customer to order an HP 3000. But not the first customer to receive a new system, perhaps a good thing. The initial shipments of HP 3000s only fulfilled Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard's doubts. Their H-P was stuck with a product which started as a disaster. It was up to another Bill to break the news.

HP put its best face on this first delay, telling Yale-New Haven Hospital that "When a first order comes from a hospital such as Yale-New Haven and from [Dr. David Seligson] a person with an international reputation in the field of laboratory automation, we are doubly flattered." But this HP 3000 system was going to ship late to New Haven.

In yesterday's entry, we tracked the options available for HP 3000 data encryption. None looked simpler than the Orbit Software product, Backup+/iX, now engineered for 256-bit encryption of data during backups only. The backup-triggered encryption minimizes performance drain, a potential pitfall of encrypting data.

But the question of when to encrypt surfaced just a few hours after the discussion of product and freeware solutions. Tracy Johnson observed

Encryption of data on the host itself is really a waste of time. Why? Unless there is no access control at the host? Encryption during transmission between two computers is usually how it is done because that is when data is vulnerable.

Pete Eggers, whose name has been mentioned as a potential OpenMPE director, replied that the moment of encryption was not clear from the customer's question: how to encrypt a dataset in a TurboIMAGE database.

There is nowhere enough information presented to say that host data encryption is a waste of time — nor enough information to say that any form of transmission of the data warrants
encryption.

Regulations drive today's encryption needs, much of the time, for HP 3000 customers. Security and SOX, COBIT or PCI compliance go hand in hand. And even though HP has offered little in the way of MPE/iX encryption tools in recent years, the marketplace and clever administrators and developers know how to keep the mission-critical bits under wraps.

While OpenSSL routines offer encryption potential in the Apache WebWise free offering, these routines are now nearly seven years old. Even the latest OpenSSL versions date to 2005. Implementation is not for the faint of heart.

One commercial solution and some techniques emerged recently on the HP 3000 newsgroup and mailing list. A 3000 manager asked how to encrypt one field in a TurboIMAGE database. An easy-to-implement reply came from Orbit Software. Developer Mark Klein plugged Backup+/iX "that will do encryption only at backup time."

Sure enough, the 256-bit encryption key in the Orbit product stands as the strongest protection in the 3000 community. More bits in the key means a tougher challenge to crack it through a brute force method. Documents classified as Top Secret by the US Government require encryption keys of 192 or 256 bits. Orbit's software, available for MPE/iX, was driven by the needs of customers in the banking industry.

Klein, working as an independent developer for the Orbit labs, pointed out that HP 3000 databases are privileged, a step that offers reasonable security. But not crack-proof, unless good procedures to protect that privilege are in place. Without high-powered solutions, encrypting with open source software can have stiff penalties, he said.

Note that software encryption has large performance consequences, so you really need to be clear as to whether or not the data must be encrypted in the database or encrypted for other means. If your need for encryption is to secure your data transmissions, consider using a network link that itself is encrypted. These can be hardware-accelerated, which will mean the performance will be better.

Keeping up with changes and options became a lively discussion on the newsgroup.

For the next six weeks or so, Client Systems is giving away a Series 9x8 PA-RISC HP 3000 to everyone who purchases an N-Class HP 3000 (also PA-RISC, but a whole lot faster. Like the difference between a HP Relative Performance Rating of 39 for the biggest 9x8, and 499 for the smallest N-Class Client Systems is selling.)

That modest 9x8 — which still runs MPE/iX 7.5, if you're willing — isn't the only free offering from this former 3000 North American Distributor for HP. Client Systems reports it will do a free Disaster Recovery assessment, which will include

• Inventory report
• Components at risk (no longer supported or scarce in the market)
• Suggested DR systems and/or components
• Cost of suggested DR systems and/or components

Those free Series 9x8s sometimes come pretty cheap these days; a few have been offered on eBay for under $200 for the low-power models. But that's still a bit of a bonus "while supplies last." Client Systems is also cutting prices an extra 20 percent for 3000s purchased as Disaster Recovery systems.

The deals end on August 31. Prospects can contact Gary Marcove at Client Systems to arrange the DR assessment, discount, or the free-with-purchase 9x8 HP 3000.

At the most recent HP Technology Forum, the OpenMPE meeting began with a thanks to HP. For changing its course of business, away from the HP 3000 community? Not at all. Instead, the thanks came from OpenMPE's chair Birket Foster "for creating MPE, the only business operating system HP ever created. It has made all of us, over the years, a lot of money."

Foster's heartfelt thanks is also accurate. The prosperity starts with the earnings HP collected for its own creation; then to the product and service providers like Foster's MB Foster Associates, all who've built their successful businesses on the foundation of HP 3000 revenues; then to the computer professionals who've earned a reputation and built careers from the expertise they demonstrate managing a business server.

There's more money to be made off MPE, the heartbeat operating system of the 3000 success. "Over the next few years, there's going to be a lot of 3000s that will need to be, excuse the expression, baby-sat," he said. These business models, from individual consultants and companies, to do this baby-sitting are just now taking off.

Scratch the surface of any of the experienced consultants and you'll find resources to tend your 3000. Support companies serving the 3000 indefinitely — those who committed to 2007 services even before HP changed its exit date — do such babysitting. The list runs from longtime resources like Pivital Solutions, which transitioned its authorized 3000 reseller status into a support business, to the much-newer shingles being hung out such as John Bawden's Homestead 3000 service.

This kind of baby-sitting will be new to the 3000 community, a byproduct of HP's decision to discontinue sales and its support of the system. Migrations take years, a period that requires caretaking of a computer that's still at the center of much commerce around the world. Foster also made it clear that OpenMPE's directors are working to earn money from HP itself, and eager to turn MPE into a business if HP will ever exit the community — and hand over OS source.

At last month's HP Technology Forum, the company organized a speed-dating ring of interviews for me. In less than three hours I was briefed by five different company officials about the HP products and strategies in Hewlett-Packard's talking points for the Forum. Most of the conversations revolved around products and services unavailable to run on the HP 3000 — but that's pretty much what HP has on offer now for a computer that it first shipped nearly 35 years ago.

One of HP's proffered products seemed a better match for the HP 3000 customer who's moving their IT strategy to a new, larger scope. HP says this kind of move can make "IT become a strategic partner to the business." Compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) and ISO standards, like the new ISO 20000, make this expansion of strategy even more complex. Those standards are not going away, and most companies continue to expect more from IT investment.

A group of documents has helped some companies organize and spark this deeper strategy. HP was talking up the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) in many of my interviews. HP's even got an on-demand video about ITIL. One HP manager said that Hewlett-Packard has 5,000 people certified in ITIL, adding that a handful of HP employees had a role in writing the Operation volume for the library — which just got a new version on May 30. ITIL was front and center alongside HP's "midsize getting bigger" IT offerings for networks, security and services.

Josh Buckley, Program Manager for HP Services, offered up one new solution, HP Best Practices for ServiceCenter. For any company that's found OpenView to be a useful framework for IT practices, HP's 2006 acquisition of Mercury Interactive has made that long-standing network and systems management software an even more comprehensive solution. HP has even retired the name OpenView, in lieu of something called HP IT Service Management (ITSM), the OpenView software, plus years of experience, "to transform your IT into a real business and competitive differentiator."

For the HP 3000 shop heading into deeper waters in the wake of a merger or an acquisition, committed to HP's Unix solutions, ITIL and ITSM options are a point of the IT compass to watch. ITIL is no cure-all set of practices, but it's a place to begin a resurgence of IT's structure. A first-rate summary of ITIL is available on the Web, explaining with an interactive guide how this set of practices born in the UK in the 1980s has become a key tool for some think-big IT managers.

After a springtime purchase of Acucorp by Micro Focus, the two leading COBOL suppliers for HP 3000 migrators joined hands on the Internet today. A one-hour Webcast over a Microsoft Live Meeting channel ran long on strategy and shorter on tactics about the product integration between the two companies. Gary Crook, VP of Software Development at Micro Focus, took on the task of explaining a product line merger that's only two weeks along.

"As everyone knows, the most important goal of any project is to give it a name," Crook said in an introductory quip. He went on to more serious details by reporting the integration of the Micro Focus and Acucorp product lines is called "Project Meld. A Vulcan mind-meld of the software would be great — if only it were that easy, we'd have something for you to use today. We'll have some challenging work ahead of us."

Crook said that the goal of the merger is to incorporate the major features of each product in a joined release. Acucorp's Drake Coker added that the intergration's success will be "based upon the ease each with which you all can upgrade."

Version 8 of the AcuCOBOL-GT suite will roll out as planned, with an expected release date of September. The two companies' first release of integrated technology will require the better part of two years, with a target date of May, 2009.

COBOL providers Micro Focus and Acucorp have shared their Wednesday, 11AM EDT Webcast access information with the world today, delivering on a promised e-mail with the detail.

At a Live Meeting Web address, HP 3000 customers with COBOL apps to migrate, plus the existing Micro Focus and Acucorp installed base, can access the news about the future of AcuCOBOL v. 8.0.

Regardless of your desktop capability, you can dial in for the audio of the briefing by calling 866-220-1452 in the US; 0800 953 1444 in the UK; and 44 (0) 1452 542 300 from everywhere else in the world.

The vendor's conference ID for the call-in bridge line is "Acucorp Prepares for Version 8" or ID# 6565093. Meanwhile, if you're new to the Live Meeting software, you can log in on the Web as early at 10:30 EDT — a good idea for any who need time to configure Live Meeting.

Acucorp's solution for COBOL apps recently earned praise from the 3000 user community. The AcuCOBOL-GT extend suite has a command line compiler as well as Acubench, a graphical interface, for development.

Two months after Micro Focus purchased rival COBOL maker Acucorp for $41 million, customers will learn this week how development plans will proceed for the 8.0 version of AcuCOBOL GT, the flagship product that's replacing many an application written in the 3000's COBOL II. Third party COBOLs were never very popular in the 3000 marketplace. Now they represent the only choices for the future — at least for those companies migrating from the 3000, and sticking with COBOL.

Wednesday, July 11 at 11 AM EDT, Micro Focus and Acucorp will lead customers through a Webcast to explain how the product line features will unfold. Much of the 3000 community relies on COBOL applications, and a good share of that community is headed toward platforms like Windows and Unix.

You must sign up for the Acucorp briefing. The company promises to e-mail details on July 10 to access the July 11 Webcast for those who fill out the form at

www.microfocus.com/promotion/NAWCACV80707/register.asp

Several weeks ago, the HP 3000 community hosted a beach party for members in the Bay Area. The June celebration unfurled on the Santa Cruz shoreline, in a spot where the old BARUG user group had met during the 1980s — an era when the 3000's fate at HP was sunny as any Pacific Coast beach.

OpenMPE member Donna Garverick-Hofmeister, who organized this Dodge-em Car reunion, reported the turnout was good, even though few of the just-retired HP 3000 experts made the time to drive "over the hill," as the trip across Highway 17's switchbacks is known.

I thought the whole BARUG went well, although not as many people came as I was hoping. I had some fair interest, but a number of last minute cancellations. I guess Chuck Shimada was a surprise, since he lives in SoCal (but he was in the area for another reason).  Jeff Vance was the only HP’er that came.  Mike Paivinen kept saying he’d come but — you know how the wild retirees are.

The community element that drew current and former 3000 experts, customers and managers represents the strength for a group that has its vendor leaving the market pretty soon. (At left are a quartet with more than 100 years of 3000 experience, and none have left yet: from left, Stan Sieler, Gavin Scott, Steve Cooper and Shimada. (Chuck maintained all those Interex HP 3000 show configurations for many years, and still has copies of the Interex CSL tapes, the last time we asked.) These people in your community remember one another, stay in touch, and have not forgotten the sometimes-arcane commands and knowledge to keep a 3000 running.

Some have suggested that the departed HP employees with 3000 experience might be available for third-party projects on MPE/iX, once the OS has been licensed to a third party. A modest retainer against billable hours could be just the backstop a homesteading OpenMPE member could count upon.

Here in the US it's Independence Day, a holiday we celebrate to mark the country's trip down a new path independent of its founding authority figure, Great Britain. (I am told the British celebrate today as "the anniversary of the time we got rid of those pesky colonists.")

Which goes to show us how anything can be viewed from more than one point of view, so long as you have an open mind. While we take a bit of a break from the news beat today, I'll remind you to embrace your independence as an HP 3000 partner or customer, whenever that new course suits you. If you're migrating, your company's schedule will determine you new platform and when you will move, not HP's support deadline.

One major manufacturer's division will be on HP 3000 systems until 2013, we heard at the Tech Forum, waiting their turn to become the latest SAP installation. Recent news shows us that HP is slipping out of the support business in degrees, with 2009 being the Year of Custom Legacy Support.

If you're homesteading, you are building a new country, as it were, creating new states of supply and support independent of HP's. Or you may be looking for work as your longtime employer steps away from the HP 3000. Just this week we found notice of a need for 3000 experience, up in the Pacific Northwest at Bellevue Community College. Or a search for HP 3000 experience to support a migration from the Allbase database.

By Gilles Schipper
Homesteading Editor, 3000 NewsWire

Yesterday I introduced the strategy of using RAID storage, starting a low-cost MOD20 array, to improve a 3000's performance. Here's a few other things to consider if you will be acquiring a MOD20.

Although possible, I would not recommend utilizing RAID5 LUNs in an HP 3000 environment — unless your greatest priority is to maximize disk space availability at the expense of performance.

RAID5 offers fail-safe functionality over a group of disks (minimum of three) by means of one disk of the RAID5 disk being allocated as a parity disc. The benefit of RAID5 over RAID1 is that it results in a greater amount of overall usable disk space than RAID1. However, it performs poorly in an HP 3000 environment, and cannot be booted from if specified as the system disk (LDEV 1).

Although the supported maximum memory configuration of each Storage Processor (SP) unit is 64MB, 128MB works best (although not all of it can be used).

Each SP has 4 memory slots. You can maximize the performance of the MOD20 by populating each SP with four 32MB memory SIMMs, 72-pin, FPM with parity, 60ns.

By Gilles Schipper
Homesteading Editor, 3000 NewsWire

In my last column, I listed the cost-effective options available to the HP 3000 homesteader to enhance the performance and reliability of the their aging 3000 server. Various opportunities related to backup, disaster planning, performance optimization, security and reliability were briefly described.

One of the most cost-effective ways of advancing the reliability of your legacy system may be to replace your existing “JBOD” disk system with a much more reliable disk system, commonly referred to as RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks). MOD20 units, now less expensive than ever, can provide a good starting point to implement RAID.

In contrast, JBOD is an acronym meaning “just a bunch of disks” — which would characterize the majority of HP 3000 systems as they were initially sold. JBOD disk systems comprise a set of independent — typically SCSI-connected — disks, which are each seen by the HP 3000 as a single logical device number or LDEV.

Each disk LDEV is associated with a “volume set” and the failure of a single disk renders the “volume set” to which it belongs inoperable and unaccessable.