HP to release more 3000 patches
June 17, 2008
HP engineer Jim Hawkins reported here at the HP Technology Forum that Hewlett-Packard will be moving some more of its patches to improve 3000 reliability and add features.
HP issued a letter from OpenMPE liasion Jeff Bandle outlining the extra patches available to everyone in the 3000 community.
The issue of MPE/iX patches that are in Beta-Test (BT) status has been a subject of mutual interest between OpenMPE and HP. HP is pleased to inform you of some positive developments in this area.
As you recall, patches in BT status have been tested by the MPE/iX lab but are still awaiting end-customer testing and validation before they can be moved to General Released (GR) status and made available to all HP e3000 users. These quality assurance processes have been in place for several decades and contribute to the high patch quality level that HP e3000 users have come to expect.
For the last several months MPE/iX Lab and HP Support engineers have been working together to accelerate the movement of MPE/iX BT patches to GR status while not compromising patch quality. As a result of this effort, nearly half of the candidate BT patches have been moved into GR status. Patches for release 7.5 saw the most activity with nearly two-thirds of the 7.5 BT patches finding their way to GR status and they have been incorporated into the forthcoming 7.5 PowerPatch release.
While we are very pleased with these results, there are still patches in BT status. HP is continuing to work on its plans for these remaining BT patches and we are planning to announce details on the disposition of these patches before MPE enters the MPS w/o SE phase of support on January 1, 2009.
"We did a lot of work in that area," Hawkins said at the Tech Forum. "For a lot of patches that have been languishing in beta test status, we've been able to move them into General Release status so they can be downloaded from the HP ITRC, which makes them freely available."
Some of the delay in getting these patches out to the community at large lay in HP paperwork, Hawkins added. "We kept the same criteria we had in the past," he said. Delay of the patch release "was more often a bookkeeping measure. There were patches where the feedback wasn't good from the customers, and wasn't good from the customer support people back to the lab."
Refreshing those chains of information and being proactive about contacting the testing customers helped to release some of the patches. HP will send a letter to the OpenMPE members and the 3000 community later tonight.
"Part of the beta test process for patches is always evaluation and engineering decisions," Hawkins explained to group of five attendees at an end-of-the-day 5:15 OpenMPE update meeting.
He added that HP focused on releasing patches for MPE/iX version 7.5. That release will have a PowerPatch 5 (a collection of general released patches) available to HP support customers in August.