HP's 3000 boxes step closer to solid storage
December 10, 2018
Almost two years ago, an expert in HP's 3000 systems was working to use solid state disks (SSD) with the computer. John Zoltak was trying to link the server to microSD cards late in 2016. He checked in with us this week to report success on the project.
SSD on 3000 hardware from HP has been a dream for several decades. Imperial Computer had a solid state unit early in the 1990s that held a promise of faster IO transfer on MPE/iX. The cost was astounding compared to moving media and the capacity was a fraction of spinning disk drives'. Much later, SSD has become something of a desktop standard and is an active choice in enterprise servers, too.
The MPE/iX hardware from HP -- to us, something called an HP 3000 -- wanted to play from SSD, too. In his prior report, Zoltak was trying to copy one 917LX disk to a new disk on the server's SCSI bus. A 4GB drive is standard on a 917, so just about any microSD card would match that storage. Now there's a V6 edition of SCSI2SD, a combination of hardware and software that delivers SD storage to HP's 3000 iron.
The combination now works beautifully, said Zoltak, who's working at Fives North American Combustion in Cleveland, Ohio. "You want the V6 boards," he said. "The V5's are much slower. The V6 takes a full size SSD card and up to 128GB has been tested." Michael McMaster, the inventor based in Australia, has engineered the latest version of his product "as a complete redesign for the V6 boards, which use a completely different microcontroller." The device is for sale online at Intertial Computing. Today's price is $105 including 16GB of microSD.
The product employs a SCSI-2 Narrow 8-bit 50-pin connector. It does SCSI FAST10 synchronous transfers at 10MB/second. Zoltak is reaching way back into the HP 3000 hardware closet to test. He's attached the SCSI2SD to a Series 917.
"I have the board sitting on top of the system with a cable around to the back on the same SCSI as the 917's DAT and DLT drives. I did a reconfigure and a restore to the SSD. Seems to be fairly quick. While restore was running I used HP Glance and saw that the disk was doing about 65-70 IO's per second. This is not as fast as the Nike array it came off of, but then it was on a differential wide SCSI."
The bigger benefit is that the HP MPE/iX iron can rely on SSD instead of moving media. Disks are among the leading culprits in HP's 3000 failures in 2018. Tape is a close second. Storing and moving bits gets complicated while using the hardware that HP certified for storage with 3000s than a decade ago.
Newer storage reduces the risk of homesteading. This is one of the benefits of using a virtualized 3000, too.
Zoltak has been working directly with McMaster. "After many go arounds he sent me a new revision of the board.
It wasn't until now that I finally got around to trying again and it works beautifully. It really is amazing to see a HP 3000 system like this that which used to run on [disks the size of] washing machines now running off of a 1-inch square and cardboard-thick media."
SD-based storage can be a staple of the MPE/iX experience using Charon from Stromasys, too. IOs are faster in a native configuration where SSD on an Intel box links directly to an PCIe bus. Using PC-based disks, of course, is one of the serious advantages to using a Stromasys Charon emulator for 3000 work. The 9x7s are so old they don't have a Charon equivalent, but the strategy is the same.