Staff's expertise sparks 3000's replacement
July 18, 2013
One of the more entrenched MPE advocates in the 3000 community has seen his server move into archive status. John Wolff, who was formerly the Vice Chairman of the OpenMPE group, reports that the Series 928 that drove the self-storage provider has been replaced with a Windows application. However, the MPE architecture and the health of the 3000 did not drive this replacement.
This was actually done for an interesting reason. My programmer was 72 years old and an expert at Transact, and I am 67 years old. Looking at the future it would be very difficult to find replacements for us given the "ecosystem" for the HP 3000 at this point. I think the hardware could be kept going for another 10 years, but the personnel could not.
So the programmer retired, and the computer operations were moved to a Windows application. It's less efficient than the 3000 -- so much so that LAACO has hired two additional staffers to do processes manually with the Windows app that MPE and Transact did completely automatically, Wolff said.
The migration mantra says that retaining and finding MPE-savvy staff is the hardest part of homesteading. This case study is about a replacement of the application however. Change is the common element, but replacing an app is less dependent on knowledge of the code's internal structure. A replacing company is making a transition.
We're shifting the name of the "Migration" category to "Migration & Transition" as of today, to reflect the two approaches to change.
Despite the cost of acquiring the Windows application, and hiring the extra staff to do what MPE and Transact did, plus the capital cost of more compute power for an existing server, Wolff said LAACO is in better shape for the future.
Naturally we transferred our data, which was no big deal. The new application does not require any Windows pros, as it is totally maintained by the vendor. Judging support costs between the two systems was not even considered, as they are both nominal. The Windows hardware was already leveraged because it runs as a virtual server. So, costs of ownership were not even considerations. It had much more to do with specialized future human resources.