Bottoms up delivers a bubbling MPE future
August 5, 2013
Not a single source of information can verify how many HP 3000s are working today. Never mind the complications of whether a 3000 is archival, or running until a migration is started or completed. Nobody knows where the systems are or the number that are working. Islands of information about 3000s were tied to resellers, to the vendor, even to third party software suppliers.
Sometimes the owners themselves don't know there's a 3000 in their IT data environment. MPE experts move on and their replacements just think of an application that supplies computing services. Not the host system or the environment hosting it.
Support companies work to find these 3000 outposts. The IT staff onsite often needs help, instead of making the call they might've to Hewlett-Packard 10 years ago or more. They might even need a path into the future for the server, a way to ensure the hardware will carry onward as far as needed. Even more than two decades. We heard of one 3000 user that needs its applications available until 2035 to meet regulatory requirements.
Stromasys wants to sell its Charon HPA virtualization solution to those companies. They're also recognizing that to find everybody, they need a bottom-up effort to go along with top-down prospecting. The bottom might be considered grassroots. That's where partners come in.
The program is still in its earliest days, but it has the potential to involve some providers who've been looking for a way to help get Charon HPA up and running. In some cases, setting aside the testing, the company claims its virtualizer can take over in a matter of days.
The testing is a significant part of this transition. But all Charon does -- that little miracle -- is turn an Intel Core i7 server, running Linux, into a PA-RISC server. The rest to be tested runs the same as it ever did on HP iron.
In the past we've heard from indie consultants Craig Lalley and Paul Edwards about seeking a way in to the Charon story. Depending on how much effort Stromasys makes to reach out to such partners -- Doug Smith of DSC Consulting in the Dallas area is another -- these indies might bring the biggest story of this decade to the smallest of 3000 users. Perhaps including some who only recently learned they've been 3000 users all along.