Mission-critical, disaster-ready, in big places
January 10, 2008
HP eased your community into the Transition Era for 3000s with a tidy sweep of the broom. Companies would be staying on the HP 3000 for years to come, yes. But they'd be small companies, or enterprises with little to no growth.
You get the idea. The large companies will be migrating, or already have done so. This has been true in lots of places. But don't think that the message is always homesteading = a small, static company.
A few days ago I heard from Matt Perdue, who runs Hill Country Technologies. He's a vendor and partner to the 3000 community who offers Internet services, 3000 consulting, Amisys expertise, and disaster recovery, even down to a turnkey level. His clients are 3000 sites around North America. He passed us a report of a new client, still using a 3000 — a finance firm of hefty size, undaunted by the risk, as HP maintains, of using the system in mission-critical operations.
Perdue, who serves on the OpenMPE board of directors and also supplies HP 9000 and Linux disaster recovery, wrote us:
Hill Country Technologies, Inc. is pleased to announce that it will be providing disaster recovery services to a leading financial services company in Mexico whose parent company has operations in more than 60 countries and is listed in the top 15 in Forbes Global 2000 and Forbes International 500 lists (2003).
Perdue probably made the greatest deal in the history of the 3000 market in 2006 when he bought a used Series 987 from the Spring Independent School District in Texas, paying just $100. He said the server, a real workhorse of its day that Spring listed in an auction starting at $5, is carrying DR and administration duties nicely.
That 987 is still serving well. I use it to install and test disc drives and get them formatted for use. It sure comes in handy to have a machine to dedicate to that task. Also it’s served as a backup server for a client for a short period of time — it matched what they had in production.