Enterprise-News

3000's cells seem simpler to retrained vets

Walter Murray was a veteran of 10 years' service in HP's language labs when he left the company in 2003. HP's writing was on the wall about all things MPE including the server's languages. Murray took an IT post at the California state prison system. But last month he left the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation for another state agency job. The new work has led Murray into a genuine legacy cellblock: IBM's mainframes, the System Z and MVS.

Murray is a veteran of the 3000 from 1975 onward, but his newest job is in the world of systems which are even more established. "I'm spending a lot of time learning how to do all the things that were so easy in MPE," he said this week. In 25 years at HP,he worked on 3000 graphics software, the HP Toolset manufacturing development suite, 3000 millicode, HP COBOL and the C compiler and libraries at HP’s language labs. During the era when Hewlett-Packard was developing and improving compilers for the 3000, Murray was doing the engineering.

Murray signed on to enter a different, more complex world of data processing with IBM legacy iron. In the meantime, the 3000 platform is still working in what some might call cells at 33 prisons. About 40 HP 3000s still run at the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which includes one A Class at each of the 33 state prisons, an N-Class at the central office, and a handful of test machines.

Another veteran of the 3000 checked in with us to report he's set a flight path for some of the newest computing, after the same length of journey in MPE. Paul Edwards has bought an iPad 3, a tool for heading back into the skies as a pilot at age 71. That iPad, Edwards' first Apple tool, is in his cockpit because it runs an application he needs. Even the BYOD marketplace follows the same attaction as the 3000s do -- it's the software.

COBOL You Know, vs. COBOL You Don't

Migrations are in play all over the world between HP 3000 systems and Linux environments. Nobody seems to be reporting very many at the moment, but the Little OpenSource Environment That Could is a regular replacement when a 3000's futures go a-wanting.

All well and good, in many instances. Hiring Linux help is never an issue, but the know-how and replacements for the rest of the 3000 ecosystem are more complex. For example, a customer who's been using scripts in their HP 3000 ops needs a replacement. MB Foster's created one for Windows in UDAXpress, which the company has been demonstrating this year.

COBOL, however, becomes an element that might be integrated tighter than you'd imagine in a 3000 program suite. For example, one recent migration project we heard about included a 4GL-to-4GL Powerhouse.

The decision was made to move the application largely as is, to Powerhouse on Linux, and to Oracle. Porting Powerhouse is not too onerous; apart from a few limitations and differences, you just port the code across and recompile it with Oracle as the target database, and off you go.

There was one catch, and it might become one in a migration near you. Some core calculations can be enshrined in a set of COBOL routines. Maybe they were too complex to write in Powerhouse. So at this point, a Linux-bound customer is looking seriously for a COBOL replacement. They can reach for commercial products which run on Linux, or look to the open source community at OpenCOBOL. Some such migrations are moving from a COBOL they know, to a COBOL they don't. The commercial COBOLs have support staff and training. Open, not so much, unless a third party gets involved.

Sparks powers down 3000, opens Windows

The president of the Connect user group and a veteran of 28 years on the HP 3000, Steve Davidek has announced that his employer, the City of Sparks, Nev., has taken its last HP 3000 application offline.

It is with extreme sadness that I inform you that the City of Sparks, Nevada has powered off our last HP 3000. The last payroll has been processed, the last report has been printed and all relevant data has been archived. This HP 3000 (a 969KS-220) went online September 22, 1996. Its last day of use was July 6, 2012. Powered down October 10, 2012.   

In all these years we only lost one power supply and one system board (lost when that power supply failed). Our first HP 3000 was installed in September 1980, a Series III. I'll miss this reliable and trustworthy system. My 28 years managing our HP3000s have been the best.

The cut-away from the 3000 began amid cutbacks at the city. Just before Sparks started cutting things it signed for a new financial system to get off the HP 3000. "Not that we wanted to, but we had to move forward," Davidek said nearly two years ago. He had been managing HP 3000s which were supposed to be offline in 2010, but homesteading has a way of occupying more of the future than companies expect.

For all of the devotion and experience Davidek admits for the 3000, it’s time for his shop — where he started as an operator and now manages a staff that handles hundreds of PCs and several dozen Windows servers — to move into the world of Windows.

Now arriving: Calls for an HP breakup

Hewlett-Packard's stock took another tumble today, the latest bit of insult added to the injuries of the year 2012. Shares closed at $14.37, a low that HP hasn't seen in more than a decade. The sell-off was triggered by an HP analyst briefing you can watch for yourself on the Web. The financial experts are edging toward a consensus that HP ought to become two companies -- with just one of them focused on your enterprise dollars.

More than 150 million shares traded hands at the end of the last week -- Monday was a market holiday -- a volume that HP had seen only once in 50 years of trading: in the shadow of the Mark Hurd ouster of August 2010. All of the high-volume days of trading since then have hammered the stock into the mid-teens. HP has found a way out of this before -- by purchasing EDS and muscling its way into top spots for PCs and servers. Those services and PC plays are gone for good. That chart above only shows the stock slide from February onward.

The breakup calls include a remarkable one from an analyst who says even Bill and Dave would push for an HP dedicated only to enterprise computing. At the Forbes.com website, UBS analyst Steve Milunovich said that activist investors or private equity buyers are likely to split up HP.

In our view, full value won’t be realized by just improving operations -- structural change is required. Based on HP’s history, we think Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard would support this approach.

But the current HP strategy is to try to reorganize its way out of a free fall dripping with quarterly red ink and slipping sales. A full split, Milunovich wrote, would at least push HP's shares to $20. Usually an analyst briefing like last week's produces a modest bounce in share prices. HP seemed to confirm just the opposite, even though its presentation included "The Great Things About HP."

Emulator freeware license needs hobbyists

HP doesn't have much impact on the 3000-only customer anymore, but the licensing terms which can matter to auditors are still in force in 2012. Although it's almost nine years since Hewlett-Packard built a 3000, the MPE/iX license tied to every server still carries some barbs.

The terms are "barbs" in sense of hooks or wire, since the audited 3000 owner will see these license items are designed to stick to the servers. You could download a personal freeware copy of HPA/3000 this month, or even next. But as things stand today, HP expects its customers to transfer their MPE/iX license to the freeware version of the Stromasys product. Even if the freeware is just there to experiment with, testing to see if it can duplicate the work of the HP-badged hardware. It still needs a license transferred. That's a $400 charge to test out freeware.

But being an MPE hobbyist might change that.

Jennie Hou of HP -- the last business manager for HP 3000s -- remains the decision maker for this kind of policy. Stromasys CEO Ling Chang, a former HP exec, checked out the chain of command last week. Bernard Determe, Service Lifecycle Planning manager for Enterprise Servers, Storage, Networking and software, said Hou is in his team and has the call on a fresher licensing concept: hobbyist copies of MPE/iX.

HP's Digital group has done this for more than a decade with VMS. The hobbyist licenses are limited to non-commercial uses. That's very good news for the 3000 user who's hoping for a hobbyist license. At least Hewlett-Packard has history of the goodwill needed to create this kind of MPE license.

How about an MPE hobbyist's advocate?

Who's still on the field for the game between HP -- the owner of MPE/iX -- and the user community? Connect is a user group representing HP customers, but the only 3000 advocates left are on the board of directors. Chris Koppe is past president and current business strategist for Fresch Legacy, nee Speedware. The current Connect president Steve Davidek manages a 3000 shop in Sparks, Nev.

OpenMPE had a good run from 2002-2009, but that's become a volunteer group for online resources like the Invent3K site. The days of advocacy over MPE might be over, some say.

But perhaps not. Stromasys is working on arranging the license and delivery specifics for a personal, freeware edition of its new HP 3000 emulator, HPA/3000. There was once a license offered for that emulator by HP. But the vendor's cutoff date to sell such $500 licenses was December, 2010. Stromasys hadn't even announced its designs by that time.

A license for freeware in HP's Digital VAX/Alpha customer base doesn't face this dilemma. Digital created a hobbyist license for VMS so long ago that HP was still building 3000s at the time. This hobbyist license gives the users of the Stromasys VAX/Alpha freeware all rights to run OpenVMS on that emulator. The same kind of license needs an advocate for MPE/iX users. Even a 60-day grace window to run MPE/iX on the emulator would be a good start.

As members of both Connect and OpenMPE can testify, advocacy is no hobby. Especially not with a company as lawyered-up as HP. But the MPE community now has an ally in a former HP executive, one who has just begun to lead Stromasys.

How LTO Tape Support Won't Matter, Soon

A few weeks ago an InfoWorld article told the IT community that the storage in the cloud was the final nail in backup tape's coffin. Our intrepid author Brian Edminster took a close look at what the Amazon Glacier cloud could do for the HP 3000 user. But it's almost as important to listen to what he's got to say about support of the latest LTO tape devices.

They won't make you need to migrate, if you can just virtualize the 3000 iron.

It's just another example of how an emulator removes the risk of staying on an environment. A virtualized server isn't going to be tied to interfaces from 10-year-old systems, or IO designs first crafted in the previous century.

This used to be a big deal in HP's engineering plans. One of the primary advantages to creating PA-RISC architecture was supposed to be peripheral support. HP figured to be writing and maintaining fewer device drivers if its enterprise servers shared an architecture. PA-RISC just led HP away from the HP-IB interface, something Hewlett-Packard created for instruments, not computers. But in practice, the operating systems still needed specialized engineering to pass data quickly between server and peripheral.

These late-gen LTO-5 tape drives are the kind of peripherals which HP supported more slowly, if at all, during the final decade of lab work on MPE. The first LTO with an HP badge, Ultrium, ran half as fast (160 mb/sec) as the same unit hooked to HP-UX -- because its mandatory MPE interface was engineered for half the bandwidth of the more updated Unix-based servers. HP never made up the difference in speed, and that shortfall arrived right out of the gate with LTO-1. LTO-5 was the state of the art in 2010, two years after HP closed the MPE labs.

Aging backup devices can pose a serious reason to consider a migration off the 3000 iron, if you're bound to an HP-badged box. The media gets harder to buy. The devices become a special case for IT to support -- although there are some crack independent companies who'll service 3000 sites regardless of what backup drives are on the job.

New iOS mobile app monitors server admin

Allegro Consultants has released what appears to be the first iPhone/iPad app which will monitor any servers running HP's Unix, Sun's Solaris, Linux or the Mac OS. iAdmin has a few more operating environments that it will touch, according to Allegro's co-founder Stan Sieler.

"Of course, we're working on adding MPE/iX support, as well as Windows," said Sieler.

iAdmin is an app that allows you to view the status of your servers  from anywhere your iOS device has connectivity.  At the moment,  you can view your disk space utilization, drilling down through  your file systems and directories, to see where your disk space  has gone, and also, get a glimpse into your CPU performance.

If you have an iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch and one or more servers  running HP-UX, Linux, Mac OS, or Solaris, you might want to try out  the app. You can find it via http://www.itunes.com/apps/iadmin or by clicking on the App Store icon at http://iadmin.allegro.com.

Details on the server and setup for the app -- it also works on the iPod Touch -- are at the allegro.com website address above.

Fresche biz for Speedware: LA's AS/400s

Fresche Legacy, the company that rebranded itself from its Speedware roots this spring, has announced a project to migrate mission-critical apps at the LA Department of Power and Water away from legacy AS/400 servers. The utility's target to take systems off what IBM now calls System i: HP's hardware running Microsoft's .NET framework.

This represents the freshest line of business for this well-known 3000 vendor. Ever since 2010, it's been partnering with HP to transform these IBM servers to HP's Intel-based systems, usually running Windows Server.

Fresche continues to serve and pursue the HP 3000 customer in a couple of ways. It's got an application support business that takes over customers' maintenance and management of MPE apps and systems. Francois Desrochers, who was once part of the Robelle labs, is working at Fresche these days. Not long ago, Fresche put out a general call for such 3000 experts -- by advertising on the PowerHouse mailing list.

The other means to engage 3000 customers comes from supporting the Speedware tools already sold into the installed base. The automated development toolset continues to run production-grade applications, and Fresche president Andy Kulakowski said 3000 tool support continues with no end-date in hand.

The company also employs a tool that it acquired to migrate these AS/400 customers. ML-iMPACT, renamed as iModernize, allows System i sites to automate conversions from legacy RPG and CL languages to Java or C#.NET. At the LADWP, that's software serving a record number of customers across an enormous stretch of California.

When HP's SUSAN Won't Say Enough

Emulator vendor Stromasys has sold a few instances of its Charon HPA/3000 virtualization engine. But there's even more interest in the free version of the product. Not much surprise there, considering the average budget for a company that's sustaining its 3000 in production use.

However, there's another kind of 3000 user who's looking at this personal freeware. Developers of MPE/iX code -- mostly consultants, and some tool and utility providers -- are expressing an interest in downloading the freeware version. When they do this, they'll require some strategy to tell their other software that the emulator is actually an HP 3000 with a valid HPCPUNAME and HPSUSAN number.

The HPCPUNAME and HPSUSAN combination is used by third party vendors to validate a license. If the combo doesn't match, most software won't load at all. (At best, you might get a demo version, but that's more of a personal computer fallback.) Stromasys is looking at the issue for the freeware it calls the A200. The paid version of the product uses a USB stick with these numbers encoded, which makes any Intel i7 Core PC capable of running a utility like Adager or an application like Ecometry.

But the days of that HPSUSAN being a unique number -- identifying only one MPE/iX licensee -- are over. CEO Rene Woc of Adager said that as HP began to use and re-install these numbers, creating its own 3000s out of HP 9000 servers, duplicates have emerged. But the combo of HPCPUNAME and HPSUSAN is still needed for verification. Even it it's not unique, it's still not generic.

"Way back when, with an HPSUSAN I would be able to tell you the HP 3000 model, and even the serial number, I believe," Woc said. "Today that's not true anymore. It's not a unique number."

This leads the users interested in freeware HPA/3000 to a challenge which Stromasys must master: How to give hundreds of freeware emulator users a way to employ their valid HPSUSAN numbers with third-party software. Only using the full complement of software on the emulator constitutes a complete test, Woc said.