Where's the lure to launch into the cloud?
September 5, 2018
We’ve talked about it here before. Is there any genuine interest from 3000 owners and managers for getting their servers migrated into the cloud? In the most common scenario today, an adequately powered Amazon or Rackspace server, or even something like a Google host, or something from Oracle, becomes the IT datacenter floor. Amazon will even sell a cloud server that only spins up when accessed. It's all billed by the hour, the day, or the amount of time connected.
For MPE/iX systems, this is only possible using a Charon install for MPE. Stromasys, which sells Charon and mentioned the possibilities for using the cloud. A notice this week announced the company is exhibiting Charon at the Gulf Information Technology Exhibition next month in Dubai. The GITEX news noted that Charon has a cloud option, saying the software is available in the cloud or on premise.
Most important for these virtual 3000s are the servers' horsepower. Doug Smith of Stromasys checked in with some upcoming Charon 3000 news and noted that 4 GHz is the CPU low bar for running Charon as fast as HP's native PA-RISC hardware.
By 2018 there's now very little hardware tuning that cannot be done if the host is up in the cloud. 3000 expertise of today works from a laptop far removed from the manufacturing or distribution floor. So what's the lure to launch an MPE server into the cloud? I think cloud’s big edge has got to be low cap-ex and assured hardware evolution.
It's in this scenario that a company which uses a virtual partition for a Charon Linux host might have a chance at containing long term hardware costs. Virtualized Linux could induce some drag on performance. That's why Stromasys only sells servers that are configured by Smith. Many 3000 software vendors have customers using the emulator.
So far, nobody's raised their hand to say they're putting a 3000 into the cloud like this.
When you think about it, “Cloud-based 3000” sounds a lot like the timesharing of the 1980s, doesn’t it? The uptime service guarantee is “It’s somebody else’s concern to keep my MPE hardware backed up and running without MPE errors.”
The first place I ever worked while reporting on HP 3000s was Wilson Publications in Austin. We used a subscriber database hosted on a Series 42 hosted down at a printing company. We dialed up using PC 2622 software from Walker, Richter and Quinn. I guess we were working on 3000s in the cloud in 1984. That might be one lure to launching into the cloud for MPE: It's been done before.