Memory boost gives 9x7s performance leap

Vaske Computer installs, supports 1.5Gb to help forestall software upgrade fees

Massive installations of memory in older HP 3000s are delivering performance increases that can forestall upgrades — and the associated software upgrade fees.

Owners of Series 9x7 HP 3000s are reporting they’ve installed up to 1.5Gb of memory in the systems, reducing run times by a process offered by Vaske Computer Solutions. The integration and support firm has assisted several credit unions using the Summit Information Systems Spectrum software in making the memory upgrade, including City County Credit Union of St. Paul, Minn., Royal Credit Union of Eau Claire, Wisc., and Founders Federal Credit Union of Lancaster, S.C.

HP only officially supports up to 384Mb of RAM on the 9x7 series, so VP of Information Systems Marc Kilgore had to go somewhere else for hardware support. He chose Vaske Computer Solutions (612.844.0054), a company that supports HP 3000 shops in the Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Northern Illinois areas from offices in Minneapolis and Madison, WI. Vaske uses subcontractors to service other locations throughout the country on a custom basis.

Kilgore said he was considering upgrading his Series 967 to a Series 987/200, or going to a 9x9 Series 3000. “We kept looking, and [Vaske] said they’d be willing to load up our 967 with 1.5Gb of memory, which we didn’t even know could be done. They said if we didn’t see a difference, they would take it back out and not charge us for a thing. How could I go wrong?”

Buying enough memory to take his system from 512Mb to 1.5Gb wasn’t cheap. But Kilgore said it was cheaper than the purchase of a new system and the cost of upgrading software on a higher 3000 software tier.

“The memory was kind of spendy, to get those high density chips, about $40,000 to $50,000,” he said. “But we didn’t have to pay for any software upgrades, and I think we’ve got another year or two of life in this box.” HP has set an end of support date for the 9x7 Series of April, 2002.

Kilgore estimated his software maintenance fees would have increased by $35,000 for each year if the credit union had purchased an upgraded HP 3000 Series 987/200. “And if we’d gone with a 9x9 system, the upgrade fees would have been double that,” he said.

As a credit union that serves 35,000 members, City County’s month-end cycle is very intensive, “with big batch processes that have serial reads on huge databases,” Kilgore said. “It was immediately apparent after a couple of hours at that time that it made a dramatic difference.” Jobs that ran 12-14 hours long only took four hours to complete.

Some jobs would do huge serial reads, “and before the upgrade, we’d see a tremendous amount of IO,” Kilgore said, “disks just churning away. The first time we looked at it after the memory upgrade, we saw five times the number of IOs before, and then no IO traffic. It loads the whole dataset into memory now, without having to do all those IOs. It’s really dramatic, and we didn’t expect it to be that good.”

The credit union also installed new disk arrays and Mirrored Disk/iX, to make its total outlay for the project about $80,000. But Kilgore attributed the majority of the speed increase to the new memory installed. “To me, it was like a free upgrade,” he said.

John Lee of Vaske Computer said the process “is not inexpensive, but it’s not nearly as expensive as upgrading hardware and software tiers. You can significantly increase the performance of your 9x7 system by absolutely loading it to the max with memory, and then controlling how it is used.” Lee said in one case, response time decreased by a factor of 6.

“We’ll let the site use the memory for seven days, and if they are not satisfied with the performance increase, we’ll deinstall it and put back in their original configuration,” he said. “Strategic Memory Systems is the memory manufacturer, but we do all the work. To date, no one has had us deinstall the memory, because performance improves dramatically.”

Summit provides all MPE/iX operating system support for the City County credit union, Kilgore said, and while the vendor told him the memory upgrade was “a foolish idea,” it continues to support the configuration with the new memory installed. The credit union dropped HP hardware support “some time ago, when we got frustrated with HP. To me, this has already paid for itself. Any [9x7 site] would be foolish not to do this.”