As legacy iron ebbs, virtual servers swell
July 3, 2013
Business must the good in the HP server replacement industry. Stromays sent its customers and allies a notice the firm is moving into larger headquarters in North Carolina.
Since opening our region in 2008, the Stromasys North Carolina office has experienced great success, thanks to the support of our partners and valued customers. Due to our continued expansion and planned growth, we are moving to a larger office space.
The new address (2840 Plaza Place, Suite 450, Raleigh NC 27612) certainly doesn't need to accomodate more servers built upon HP's PA-RISC or DEC Alpha and VAX designs. Everything Stromasys sells rolls out in virtual software mode, except for the USB keys that contain the official HP 3000 HPSUSAN ID numbers. (CTO Robert Boers told us last year that those keys cost $50 each to create, so they aren't your Fry's Electronics models.)
The company continues to investigate how to get a virtualized 3000, running on Intel hardware, up into the cloud. Even the HP Cloud, which can accept applications running on Linux -- but not HP-UX. The Stromasys virtualized HP 3000 is cradled in Linux, after all.
With a tip of the hat of congratulations to this partner in MPE's future, we also take note of another physical 3000 going offline. But the HP Series 987 (at a customer who wants to remain unnamed) is being replaced with the final model of Hewlett-Packard branded entry-level 3000 iron.
And while one of those companies may migrate to Windows in the near future, it will be a slow process. There's lots of application customization at that site. Corporate overseerers of IT want all of that organization which still relies on MPE to run on the same platform. "Otherwise they'd be happy," said a manager.
That MPE computing has been a part of this manager's life since 1984. "It’s such a workhorse! Some companies that have gone to Windows-based systems talk about performance issues." For those who haven't made the move, perhaps they sleep better at night, like those OpenVMS customers have been -- the ones which HP is cutting loose by the end of this decade.