Catch up tech can save legacy 3000s
July 24, 2017
About a month ago we celebrated the 12-year anniversary of this blog. We scooped up three of the stories from that summer week of 2005, including notice of Taurus Software's Bridgeware. Quest Software was selling Bridgeware in a partnership with Taurus in 2005. Then we added that Bridgeware product continues to bridge data between 3000s and migration targets like Oracle.
This was catchup news to one HP 3000 manager among our readers. "I wish I had known about Taurus BridgeWare before my A500 crashed," he said. "Now I cannot get the data out of it."
This can be a fate that a site in deep-static mode can't escape. If spending has stopped, but the 3000's data carries on in a now-frozen app, that's an imbalance waiting to become something more serious. Good backup strategies can mitigate that kind of failure. Last week we chronicled the failover capabilities of Nike disk arrays. However, the best failover plan is the one that loses little to nothing because it's all being mirrored all the time.
Manufacturing sites have taken to sharing their data across multiple platforms for many years. The Support Group keeps up with information on the best-preserved tools to move data between manufacturing 3000s and SQL Server databases in real time. Playing catch up with tech is a better choice than wishing you knew about things like Bridgeware. We covered that bridging tech in detail you can find here on this blog. Here's a recap.
A good share of the Bridgeware work has been supporting customers who want to stay on the server. "We’ve been building a lot of operational data stores lately for customers who want to stay on the 3000," said Cailean Sherman. "These people want to have their production data available real time in a relational environment for reporting and analysis. The data can be ported to open systems once a migration is over, to replicate data between databases and files on open systems."
There have been other ways to capture HP 3000 data for mirroring in real time for a lower price point. Many, however, haven't survived into the current decade. The challenge in the homesteading community is keeping up with what's been acquired or pulled into the stable of a larger company (the fate of Powerhouse comes to mind in the latter category).
The best way a manager can get customized advice about this is to invest in consulting support from a company specializing in HP 3000 issues. We refer our readers to Pivital Solutions for this holistic support. It's a company that grew up in manufacturing application services.