2012 marks 3000 flights of Linux penguins
December 28, 2012
By Ron Seybold
Third in a series
The year 2012 might have been the first to signal a significant decline in the number of migration projects among the HP 3000 installed base. But for those who were making their transition, Linux was more popular than ever, in either a supporting role to protect HP 3000s, or as host environment.
Add in the 2012 doubts about Oracle's database support for Itanium -- with the attached concern about HP-UX -- and Linux took steps forward to stand as an equal migration target to HP's Unix. In an allied story, since Oracle's technology looked doubtful for HP's Unix futures, other database solutions took a higher profile among 3000 migrators.
Marxmeier Software's Eloquence database 8.20 gained indexing features in 2012 so valuable that the 3000 community members once paid extra for them. With a decline in the availability and future of the '90s-era Omnidex indexing tech, Eloquence's creators added a fast indexing technology, one which its advocates called "like a Google search through your database" in speed. The database has been in 3000 migration toolsets since the earliest days of the transition era, in part because Eloquence applies relational database management for Linux (and HP-UX and Windows) in an IMAGE workalike design.
Migrations in total started to show some significant declines at selected service-providing vendors during 2012. Speedware became Fresche Legacy in the spring of the year, a shift that embraced IBM midrange migrations. The company's president said that the period from the start of 2011 through March of 2012 posted no new 3000 migration projects. Fresche's Chris Koppe said he didn't think the era of migration had ended for the community, while fellow Platinum Migration vendor MB Foster said it was still engaging new 3000 migration business.
The shift in the community's migrations was running down to individual companies, said the Eloquence database creator Michael Marxmeier, after ISV customers finished their transitions. "By now the majority of that migration business is over, and that's okay," said Marxmeier. "ISVs have settled in place; they've probably already moved on. At the beginning they had to come up with a solution to keep their customers successful, and quickly."
Even HP had its preferences for Linux hosting over HP-UX. HP's clouds are pretty much a non-starter for existing long-time HP customers. You can't host HP-UX apps in HP's cloud.
HP's Odyssey project wants to bring "hardened" HP-UX features to RedHat Linux, since HP doesn't want to be left out of the Linux currents. While there's a clear five-year future of HP-UX, the years beyond that are less defined. Since companies like Europ Assistance are going to take multiple years to make a migration, few of them want a future shorter than a decade.
More analysts and developers spoke up in 2012 about considering Linux the next, best alternative for the customer who doesn't want to embrace a proprietary Unix. (All of the Unix environments are proprietary, starting with HP's Unix, Sun/Oracle's Solaris, as well as IBM's AIX. Code created for one OS must be revised to work in another.)
These changes, however, loom larger than the strategy of moving from a Unix to one of the Linux distros such as Ubuntu (favored for the 3000 emulator) or RedHat. Marxmeier said this kind of migration wouldn't be painful for an Itanium Unix customer.
Itanium certainly has its users, and it’s hard to tell if it will make it or not. However, this shouldn’t be a concern to the customer. But if they’d like to move to something else, the proven technology of Linux is readily available. About half of our customers are using Linux these days.
Bill Highleyman of the High Availability Journal said the HP Odyssey project, one which aims HP-UX key features at a hardened RedHat, could make Linux an easier choice than HP-UX.
"If Project Odyssey is wildly successful, it may drive a huge competitive advantage for HP," he said. "However, if HP customers embrace the move to highly reliable standard operating systems, HP-UX may be the first to go, since migrating Unix applications to Linux is a reasonable task."