First production emulator wins IT's respect
December 5, 2012
The first HP 3000 manager to take an emulator into production moved the services of very old iron onto a very new MPE/iX platform. IS Manager Warren Dawson’s company was using a Series 947 server which was more than 20 years old to take care of mission-critical operations. That 3000 had 112 MB of memory. Now it’s working on the HPA/3000 Charon emulator with 2 GB of memory. “We’ve really increased our speed, our memory and our disk,” Dawson said.
“I was testing the emulator over the last 10 months, and I was most impressed with the speed gains,” he said. The gains on month-end processes on the emulated 3000 system slashed the time from almost 10 hours to 65 minutes. “That was phenomenal, and it was on the main database. The guys at Stromasys were very pleased to hear some of the statistics I was churning out. They could emulate, but couldn’t have someone hit it every day, and hit it hard.”
“The users are very happy. They’ve notice their reports are coming up a lot quicker. Instead of 15-20 minutes, in a few minutes it’s done. Performance gains are bigger in some areas than others. The lowest performance gain I’ve found is in backup itself.”
“Because you’re not dealing with physical devices, it’s now made it a lot easier to consider even expanding what we have," Dawson said. "We had a failure of the HP 3000 box every one or two years, and it’s been really hard to source parts here in Australia. The last failure we had was an LDEV 2 disk, and so that became a SCSI disk with an adapter.”
In another instance, an internal cable for a tape drive failed. Parts supply remains an issue throughout the country, Dawson said, since there are few 3000s still running there. But he added that the company searched around the world for that cable. “The best we could get was a two-week wait for it, and we could not wait two weeks for something as critical as that.”
Over the years of moving drives in and out, the cable was pinched and then broken, and “we could not source another cable. We ended up making our own.”
The company has turned off its HP 3000 production machine. “In the end, we had the confidence to do that,” Dawson said. We’ve gone to modern hardware we can get at the drop of a hat, We can almost go into the shop and and saying that one and that one, and one in blue. It removes the need for having specialized spare parts.”
Emulation created a new range of storage space. The company had a project to split its database, due to legal requirements. To do the split, they needed to duplicate the database, and “we wouldn’t have had the space to do that on the Series 947’s disks.”
VMware hosts the virtualized partition where the HP 3000’s emulation resides. “We’ve taken the Stromasys software and moved it to its own VMware environment. It’s by itself, so nothing will impact it there. It’s running really smooth.”