HP completes 3000 transition, 12 years later
October 9, 2013
One week from today, according to our sources in the HP IT community, the last four HP 3000s will go off the Hewlett-Packard production grid. The shutdown is scheduled to take place on Oct. 16, which will put it just a few weeks shy of 12 years after HP said it was ending its HP 3000 business.
There can be many reasons why a transition away from the 3000 could take more than a decade. The most obvious one is that it doesn't make business sense to turn off an application that's still doing yeoman service. We don't know if that's the case with these 3000s and their applications.
But these 3000s run in the HP corporate datacenter based in Austin, Texas, the hometown of the 3000 Newswire. It doesn't take much search to learn that this datacenter is more than 20,000 square feet of office space that was once an outpost of Tandem Computer. HP acquired Tandem's business when it purchased Compaq. Years after HP swallowed its biggest acquisition, these 3000s were being managed into a new datacenter -- one of six targeted to consolidate the 85 HP datacenters.
Even with an opportunity to take 3000s offline in a datacenter reorganization, MPE applications prevailed. That datacenter reorg started in 2006.
At one point in the 3000's not-too-distant history -- okay, less than 20 years back -- more than 600 3000s were driving company operations. In 1996 we reported that every sales transaction flowed through the HEART application, hosted on 3000s. HEART was replaced by SAP software early in the 21st Century, a switchover that had enough bumps to draw notice in HP's own investor reports at the time.
The Austin datacenter, which can be managed remotely, is actually two physical sites with mirroring capability. One is in the Tandem facility, and the other is at a site 15 miles south which once operated the Freescale (nee Motorola) wafer fabrication operations. We're just guessing here, but it's possible those 3000s going lights-out are replicated in some way at the Freescale building.
If there remains a value policy at HP that would retain MPE apps for a dozen years, it's a good bet these N-Class boxes are going onto the used hardware market soon. The vendor has proven they're a good investment -- having used them for nearly three years beyond its own legendary "end of life" deadline for the server.