Homesteaders carry on during post-sales era

Systems upgraded, apps maintained — all in a day’s work

HP has stopped selling the 3000, but that doesn’t mean the server isn’t generating commerce anymore. Customers who intend to stay on the platform beyond HP’s support deadline are still sparking sales and support revenue, even after the system’s vendor has left the market.

The tenacity of these homesteading sites shows how simple staying with an installed business system can be. Customers need to locate hardware, but many have already developed their own sources through years of buying off the third party market.

One such 3000 customer is Therm-O-Link in Garretsville, Ohio, where Jim Phillips is improving his 3000 horsepower. In mid-January the IT manager for the Cleveland-area wire and cable manufacturer put out a public request for proposal to upgrade his Series 918 HP 3000, telling hardware suppliers and integrators he wanted a faster HP 3000.

He did not necessarily mean a newer generation of 3000, either. The prior line of HP 3000s will work fine for speed improvements. An A-Class server would be nice, but it won’t be the same kind of value as an older system. Phillips said he’s already found that the 9x9s are plentiful.

“These things are like a dime a dozen out there,” he said. “On the used market, I figure we can pick up something, and there’s plenty of third parties to do the hardware support.”

Phillips said his company is homesteading because it has no other choice. “We have a custom-written system on the HP, and it’s integrated into our shop floor,” Phillips said. “It’s our core system, and we have two people in our IS department. We’re not prepared to expend the great big bucks to convert to anything right now.”

For Phillips, the primary mission to help his company is getting a faster server. Even shifting to a 9x9 Series system would deliver the 4-5 times performance boost he needs. He plans to continue to purchase software support from HP — at least the minimal kind where a trouble call gets placed to the vendor. But using the support has been a low-priority item.

“We haven’t placed a call to HP in three years,” Phillips said. “Once we get to 7.0 or 7.5, we’ll stick it out on the system.”

Third party software from independent vendors helps drive the computing at Therm-O-Link, which has four facilities across Ohio and Texas. COBOL, IMAGE and VPlus are at the heart of an application that uses ODBC connectivity software from CSL to move data to Windows PCs.

Third party firms such as Adager, Vesoft, Robelle and AICS Research still draw revenue off the Therm-O-Link IT budget through support contracts. The company will continue with HP’s support through 2006, but it’s mostly to ensure a supply of replacement peripherals and the last version of MPE/iX.

“That’s the main reason I’m keeping the software support now,” he said. “I hope to go to RAID arrays, so I can hot swap drives with the spares we have here. We’ll go to a time and materials contract with HP.”

The contact job at Therm-O-Link “needs to be more than just a sales quote,” Phillips said in his proposal. “We need someone who can put together a system that will work the way we want it to - we need to have a fault-tolerant, 24 x 7 system, with data redundancy and zero-down-time backup.”

After he’d gotten several quotes on an A-Class system — the lowest was under $14,000 — Phillips said he’s prepared to stick with the HP 3000 line for up to 10 more years. He plans to move his Web server to the 3000 under Apache. “I don’t see any problem with HP stopping the sale of new systems, unless you need one of those leading edge systems, and you might be in a bind. But we can get by with cast-offs, so we’ll be okay.”

Customers who choose to homestead can find their support and choices improve, because they deal with local resources. At the College Park campus of the University of Maryland, system programmer Wanda Williams is tending to software too vital to replace. The university’s financials run on a 3000 in College Park, and even though an IBM system was built to take over the computing, the 3000 remains in the fiscal loop.

The campus Series 9x7 server recently was replaced by a Series 969 system, an HP 3000 rented from Ideal Computer Services. “They’re a local company and they know my systems,” Williams said. Ideal does hardware support for the 3000 as well, although the university pays for enough HP support to get update tapes for MPE/iX.

The software lineup on the 3000 is a familiar list of MPE third parties: Adager, Vesoft and Robelle, as well as Lund Performance Solutions and JMS for job scheduling. Williams sees the third party firms as essential to a worry-free future. “These people are not going away just because HP goes away,” she said. “They’ll hang in there.”