Migration savvy surfaces at HP World talk

Customers report from field on in-progress projects

When HP assembled three IT managers with HP 3000 migration field experience at the recent HP World conference, a new level of honesty flowed alongside the hands-on reports. A room of more than 40 channel partners and customers asked the trio how to succeed in moving off the 3000, and the answers showed as much candor about the level of effort as they reflected the managers’ certainty about their need to leave.

HP World attendees, though, still did not hear reports from a typical customer site that has finished a migration. Dick Drollinger, a VP at HP software vendor Summit Information Systems, came closest to delivering migration reports that included a happy ending. His company made a decision in 1999 to migrate its HP 3000 credit union application to an additional platform, and $4 million later one of the more complex MPE/iX apps is running on HP-UX. As a result of the Summit engineering, the company hopes that hundreds of its sites will be able to make the same kind of shift away from the 3000.

Summit’s core business is software development, although its migration experience might mirror the path of any customer with a more than a million lines of code to move from the 3000 to HP-UX. A few Summit sites have made the transition already, following their ISV onto HP 9000s.

Drollinger said at HP World that the effort to move the data off the 3000 takes the least resource for his customers, since the company decided to base its migrated application on the Eloquence database.

“We pretty much do an export out of TurboIMAGE, and an import into Eloquence, and we’re done,” Drollinger said. He said the process takes about 5-6 hours to move 8Gb of data, “and most of that is on the HP 3000 side, unloading. The Eloquence side loading is very fast.”

Drollinger added that the software vendor calls the process “a migration, because ‘conversion’ has a tendency to panic everybody.” Summit’s performance data from one year ago showed that moving to HP-UX took a 25 percent hit on response time, and Summit is headed back to HP’s Capacity Planning Center this fall to improve its Unix app performance.

“We were still learning all the [Unix] kernel parameters at that point [last year],” he said. “We’re guessing we’ll end up with between 15-20 percent overhead” after the re-tuning of the application.

While there were no credit union end-users on HP’s panel, two other customers testified about the migration projects they haven’t quite finished yet. Bob Lewandowski of software management services provider ASAP Software, and Gary Paveza, Jr. of insurance giant AIG, reported on their migrations to Windows ..NET and HP-UX, respectively.

Paveza, giving a rare glimpse into one of the biggest HP 3000 applications, said the company demands that the migrated systems must run for 45 days in parallel with three HP 3000s that still host the original applications. This parallel operation using Netbase, which was underway during the summer, has brought its own complications.

“It’s a very complex environment, and things do go wrong,” Paveza said. “One of the issues is that the users can actually make a change to the data on both sides. We haven’t quite gotten them trained to wait until that change is propagated through. They open another session on the other side, and make the change there. Then the data link dies, and it’s usually at 2 or 3 in the morning. The application keeps running, but it shuts down the data link for a brief period of time. Then we have to reconcile the transactions.”

Paveza added that AIG had required three HP 3000s because of performance limitations that its applications encountered on the platform.

Lewandowski, the VP of Systems at ASAP, said that his project hasn’t migrated any data yet, but the Sweet 3000 migration package from Fujitsu which takes the app to the .NET environment will handle data movement. ASAP is still determining how much data it must move away from its 3000s, systems which it may continue to use as historical archive systems.

Other app providers and tools vendors in the audience enriched the session. Neil Harvey of NHA Associates noted that a period of “freezing” applications during a migration, commonplace during Y2K efforts, was not a possibility for his customer base while making a Unix version of his app. The company continues to develop on the HP 3000, with a “migrate button” to move improvements to the Unix version of the company’s healthcare apps.

Harvey’s comment prompted Summit’s Drollinger to note that enhancements which Summit is making to its 3000 apps must first be tested on the HP-UX version before they are released. When Harvey asked if this duplication meant it was an expensive migration, Drollinger could only reply, “Boy howdy.”

How much work?

The level of candor in the roundtable rose as the three presenters summed up the total effort to take applications away from the 3000. When asked how straightforward the move to Unix had been, Drollinger replied that “a lot of the MPE bigots in our office — me being one of the biggest ones — felt that Unix was the dark side, and we were being assimilated. However, I must say that as much as it galls me, it’s been a positive experience. A lot of the things I’d been crabbing about for years on the MPE side don’t exist on the Unix side, and the transition was not as onerous as we’d originally thought.”

Summit’s VP said his company’s clients who are just learning Unix didn’t feel like the Unix syntax is the biggest issue they had to address. “It was the third party utilities, and the decentralization,” that provided the challenge — the latter referring to the fact that Summit’s application has now been broken out from a monolithic architecture to several HP 9000 systems.

“Not having everything on one system was like, trauma,” Drollinger said. “We’ve also strongly encouraged our clients to take HP’s free Web-based Unix training.” Summit has registered more than 900 seats since last year for the HP Web classes, including its own staff and clients.

Lewandowski noted that the third-party tools which make his company’s business possible under MPE remain the toughest thing to duplicate in the Unix environment. Pricing that Lewandowski received for DISC’s Omnidex on Windows, for example, was much higher than expected, he said. “One of the biggest challenges is how to duplicate that functionality without Omnidex,” Lewandowski said.

DISC’s Terry O’Brien, sitting in the meeting, assured Lewandowski that a new set of prices for OLTP HP 3000 customers who are moving to Windows will be available. Lewandowski said his company also makes extensive use of Robelle’s Suprtool, a solution only available on HP-UX, not on ASAP’s Windows .NET target.

Comparing to MPE

An audience of HP 3000 developers and customers wanted comparisons between MPE and alternative environments, as well as reports on how staff members adjusted to the differences. AIG’s Paveza said that “We have a lot of people who didn’t want to learn the Unix environment; they just wanted to go forward with their jobs.” Trying to make the IT staff use the Unix vi editor “almost caused a revolt,” so AIG purchased a Windows-based editor. The differences sounded profound in Paveza’s view.

“The concepts they have learned on MPE don’t necessarily apply, and they have a lot of difficulty with it,” he said of using Unix. “We’ve migrated from JCL to perl and shell scripting, and to Oracle. It’s not been pretty, but we’re getting there. The best thing you can offer is the training.” AIG brought HP Education in-house to train on Unix, which Paveza said “helped a lot.”

Lewandowski said the ASAP shift to Windows hasn’t been as traumatic because the company has been developing in Windows for several years. Making a move to another language at the same time was never an option while moving away from the 3000.

“We’re not moving away from COBOL,” he said. “To migrate to a different platform and change the language is sheer folly. We just tell the staff, ‘It’s still COBOL.’ We have a good base of Windows programmers.” ASAP has had to add staff to handle Windows’ extra administrative workload.

AIG’s Paveza noted that uptime has improved for his company’s applications since moving from MPE/iX, but “we were a corner-case in that we had several problems [with MPE] nobody else had.” The AIG systems administrator countered that better uptime with a need for “a lot more hardware” in a Unix implementation. One Superdome-class HP-UX server and several front-end servers are needed to drive the AIG application.

“It’s an exponential leap in memory needed by Oracle to handle our application,” he said. “It’s absolutely immense the amount of memory we need now.” A Superdome with 32 processors will drive the application, he added.

AIG made its decision to migrate before HP even managed to announce or ship the N-Class systems, because the older Series 997 servers “just couldn’t scale,” Paveza said. “We have massive IO structures on our 3000s. Tying them together with the Netbase product, while it worked, was prone to problems.”

Summit had decided to branch out to an additional platform in 1999, Drollinger explained, to seek new business for its credit union apps. Our client base had decided that HP-UX was an open system. We had an anticipation that a fair number of our clients would stay on MPE anyway. We still hold out that hope.”

The three managers sounded like they were glad a lot of the worst work was behind them. When asked what the top three things were they would have done better, or differently, Drollinger joked that “I would have won the lottery and retired.” Lewandowski had also joked about retirement being a more attractive option.

Paveza, still facing a completion of his company’s migration, said he’d have to wait and see about reporting back at next year’s HP World about AIG’s project completion. “I’ll be there only if the migration works,” he said.