3000 products remain on sale at Quest
March 22, 2011
Quest Software is sticking to a steady path with its software for the HP 3000. The company which created the NetBase clustering software (sold as SharePlex by HP through 2007) continues to offer its 3000 products on a web page dedicated to the company's 3000 business.
Quest has a much bigger presence in the database utility market today, but its product manager John Saylor pointed out that disaster recovery for 3000s has remained among the company's ongoing businesses.
"We continue to provide the homesteaders continued support for all MPE products," he said. "None of products have been end-of-lifed. Many customers have blended together multiple HP 3000s into clusters to create the horsepower necessary to support their business and to create a highly available disaster tolerant environment."
BridgeWare, a solution to synchronize IMAGE data with Oracle databases, is a much newer Quest product than NetBase. Nine products, plus several spinoffs, show the heritage of Quest development. The company's even got an NFS network file system version for HP 3000s.
Homesteading customers sometimes need software to sustain their environments. In particular, NetBase was the most unique of Quest's products, installed at some very high profile sites over the last 20 years. Clustering is tricky and painstaking technology. HP's OpenVMS environment excels at this kind of mission-critical service.
While more than a few HP 3000 software providers have had to de-commission their MPE development, it's encouraging to see a vendor continue to show unique technology, plus a raft of takes on fundamentals like spooling and file sharing. Genuine dedication to a computer HP stopped building in 2003 starts with sustaining a product lineup.