Software allies smooth path onto emulator
December 6, 2012
Customers of the HPA/3000 emulator will be watching to see which software companies want to collaborate with Stromasys, to make sure this source of modern, updated MPE/iX servers on Linux iron gets into 3000 shops.
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.
Nearly all of Dawson's third party vendors have come on board and made efforts to ensure their software works. “One was a little slow in doing so, so we made a workaround," he said, "and I made it a permanent workaround. I didn’t know when they would come on board. They came on just before we went live, and we’d already decided to move away from their product.”
In the case of the switch in backup processes, Dawson’s procedures now back up twice as much data, using HP’s standard STORE and RESTORE programs — in less than than when the backup was done using the third party software on the 3000 box.
The change from using HP’s native iron to emulation has also reinvigorated some of Dawson’s MPE software vendors.
One backup software solution didn’t make the transition from 3000 hardware and storage devices to the emulated system. DAT tapes presented an extra effort. Dawson used a utility to copy the tapes to disk, “and for some reason when I did that, it didn’t work properly in the backup software. There was some sort of SCSI issue which was at Stromasys’s end, and they’ve since resolved that issue. But the backup vendor said initially they weren’t supporting the emulator, so we worked something else out.
The Quiz reporting tool from Cognos is part of the software set that’s made the step onto the emulator. The company buys and maintains its Cognos licenses through a reseller, and that partner has handed the relicensing of Quiz onto the emulator. “I haven’t dealt directly with Cognos for a long time,” Dawson said.
Minisoft’s ODBC drivers run on the emulated system, since part of the application’s project is to extract data. Since the databases and the application have been emulated, Dawson’s remains able to use Visual Basic programs, using the ODBC drivers, to do reports as well as updates. However, the complexity of moving toward Windows 7 has raised issues that Minisoft has been helping to solve. Dawson singled out the company as taking extra time to help make the emulation succeed.
“Minisoft’s been the most helpful, because that reporting system started out being the most troublesome. We’ve been having a VB 6 program issue, where those programs ran under Windows XP but are an issue under Windows 7. These programs were written 10 years ago, and the people who wrote them are long since gone. They explained how I could run their software in different ways, with the old driver under VB 6 on XP versus a new driver for .NET on Windows 7.”
Crucial to the process was the support from the creators of the Charon HPA/3000. “I’ve been very pleased with Stromasys themselves, because any issue I raised, they fixed it as fast as they could,” he said. “I was unaware that any of my issues had already been raise, because they way they treated me was that anything I said was important to them, even if they’d heard it before. Not saying they’d already heard it, but saying, “Tell me about this, and let’s go through it.”
The biggest issue I had which I was asking them about was the security key that’s got to be connected into the host PC. We were planning disaster recovery, but we didn’t have a key to replace that one. They said they’d give us a temporary key we could use for a number of hours. They’d already addressed that possibility.”
Support issues with timezone differences haven’t presented a problem. One key Stromasys engineer bridges the gap between Australia’s workday and the one in the US headquaters, Dawson said. The Stromasys labs include operations in Moscow as well as North Carolina.