Number 60 (Update of Volume 6, Issue 5)

Voting online begins soon for SIB improvements

Interex is opening up the doors of its polling place at http://www.interex.org/advocacy this week, so the customers can tell the 3000 division what needs to be enhanced. The balloting for the System Improvement Ballot this year is happening earlier than ever, and it will take place over a much shorter, two-week period. It's this week and next to get your voices heard on things like supporting Perl as a 3000 language and disk partitioning for MPE/iX that would open up millions of megabytes of LDEV1 storage. The 3000 division has committed resources to developing what finishes high on the SIB ballot -- something under 25 percent of its available engineering manpower.

HP drops Legato's backup client for e3000

After five years of strategic coziness, Legato's backup solution is now on the outs with the HP e3000 division. The software which had well-known reliability and configuration problems is being pulled from HP's price list at the end of the month, according to letters sent to HP customers. Hewlett-Packard will also discontinue further development and enhancements to the Legato Networker Client for the HP e3000. HP's not supporting the 3000's Legato client beyond April 1, 2002, and until then it will only be supported for MPE/iX 6.0 -- a version of the OS that HP plans to stop shipping at the end of this month.

Legato was in the sweet spot with HP during strategy briefings at customers events for many years, even when other networked backup solutions were available. Customers report that the MPE/iX client software costs more than client solutions for other HP platforms, such as HP-UX. The Unix version of the Legato client isn't affected by the discontinuance notice for MPE/iX.

HP said that possible replacement products for the Legato Networker Client include Hi-Comp's HiBack, Hewlett-Packard OmniBack and Veritas Netbackup.  Omniback isn't in general release yet for the e3000, having taken awhile to make its transition from the HP-UX software side. While Veritas is in wide use in the marketplace, its client for the e3000 is relatively new. But the  NetBackup software is supported on HP-UX and Windows NT/2000 with server and client support for both along with client support for the HP 3000.

HP said it had been dealing with a couple of very big technical issues with the Storage Node client from Legato since late in 2000. HP decided it wasn't going to pursue resolving those issues, so it's pulling the software. The Omniback solution looks like it's getting the "HP strategic" imprintur now, since it will support backup libraries sometime this spring. Of course, that's a feature which the Hi-Comp solution HiBack has supported for over a year, on both the 3000 as well as Unix and NT platforms.

One of the Hi-Comp customers who first tried Legato testified on the Internet about the relative ease of using the HiBack solution."After months of failed attempts to get [Legato] to work with our e3000-based DLT library (two DLT8000s and 20 slots), we went with Hicomp's Hiback," said Eben Yong of the Health Plan of San Mateo. "Now, we back up multiple NT and Netware servers, our HP-UX box and two e3000s to our e3000-based DLT library. And the whole thing is automated - - the only "manual" steps involve labelling our weekend backups (couple of minutes each week), and physically inserting and removing the weekly backup sets (for offsite storage)." You can check out the Hi-Comp solutions at http://www.hicomp.com

Can MPE become Open Source?

It's not as outrageous an idea as it might seem at first. Some engineers inside HP want to hear arguments from experienced developers about how full access to the MPE/iX source might help the community. The topic was expected to get some airtime this month. Nobody from HP has actually offered a proposal on putting the MPE/iX source code out in the public environment like an Open Source operation. The division has been participating in a Shared Source project with Interex since the fall of 1999, but that plan hasn't produced much in the way of enhancements to things like EDITOR, Query and other HP 3000 chestnuts. HP used to sell the source code to its operating system in the earliest days of the PA-RISC releases, but it hasn't done so in a very long time. Open Source, on the other hand, gives any very sharp customer the option of making changes to MPE and then maintaining that version themselves. Perhaps even more importantly, many of the items on the SIB could be provided from the customer base with access to the operating system's source code.

Will it happen? The move for Open Source is gaining strength each day among technical communities, but MPE/iX support is a serious revenue stream for the e3000 division. If becoming part of a self-supporting community were an option, it might have an impact on companies staying in the HP-supported fold. On the other hand, the option might keep more 3000 installations alive, since going to OpenMPE would be better than going to a Sun or IBM installation, even from HP's viewpoint.

A-Class clocks fall behind in market

The longer the A-Class server specifications sit in the community, the more they get analyzed. And the comparisons to the HP 9000 servers running with the same hardware are not favorable. How is this possible, with the same hardware? Nobody has confirmed the method, but apparently the e3000 models are using some way of reducing the speed of processors installed in the A-Class units. It's unlikely that the 3000 division had different, slower PA-8500 processors recast for its A-Class units. Whatever the method, customers have determined that the price/performance numbers of the e3000 version of the A-Class are more than 10 times poorer than that of the HP-UX A-Class systems. Ken Sletten, chairman of the SIGIMAGE special interest group, said that considering the HP 3000 A-Class hardware costs three times what it's 9000 counterpart costs, and performs three or more times slower in clock speed (140 MHz versus 440), you can multiply those two numbers and get anywhere from 9 to 12 times worse price/performance.

The comparisons don't match up when considering IMAGE applications, since there's no way to get a benchmark of IMAGE on the HP-UX systems. But for applications staying outside of IMAGE, like those written in Java and calling external databases, that e3000 A-Class deficit looms large. "I realize raw CPU performance is not the whole story," Sletten said, "but it's a big part of the story."

The problem compounds when Java is considered for the 3000. The language is one of the best prospects for new applications on the platform; it's been a long time since a new application using IMAGE has emerged for the 3000. But SIG-Java co-chair Gavin Scott says the clocked-down A-Class does Java no favors on the e3000.

"MPE may be good, but is it twelve *times* better than HP-UX?" he asked on the Internet. "If your Web server and Java/Enhydra applications will run five times faster on HP-UX at one third the cost, why in the world would you not *immediately* move them off of MPE?"

Scott said he now fears "that Java may now be dead as a programming language on MPE, since Java and many of these other new technologies are relative CPU hogs that are viable only because today's modern machines are so fast that it doesn't matter."

Horner offers free tool to read console messages without console

Ron Horner of Horner Consulting is giving away LOGREADR, an HP 3000 program which reads console messages without going to the console. The utility, available at http://horner.horner.home.mindspring.com/, lets system managers see messages displayed on their console. You can search your log files, by session number, job number, or by a special string.

One of Horner's specialties is Ecometry, having consulted at the JC Penney site where the Smith-Gardner software is working for catalog companies who contract with JC Penney for distribution. "I created this Web site to help those who may be new to the world of the HP 3000," he said. "At the same time this document states, for all to see, the greatness of the HP 3000. It's time to stand up and let the people know that we are not talking about the VIC-20 here. This system has run companies for years, and continues to do so."

Bradmark buys up German partner, launches Euro office

Bradmark Technologies expanded its European facilities by opening Bradmark GmbH in Munich, Germany, as longtime Superdex developer Dr. Wolfgang Matt left his firm IABG and brought along Superdex. As its first order of business, Bradmark GmbH acquired Superdex, an indexing tool for the HP e3000. Matt will be managing the Bradmark office there and working on the development of NORAD, software which currently doesn't have an e3000 component.

Bradmark said it established its new office "to respond to the growing demand for its data management products throughout Europe. The new office will bring local sales, research and development, pre-sales support, technical support and marketing operations to the German market. This augments an existing office located in the United Kingdom and the other distributors across Europe. "

The new Bradmark office can be contacted at: 

Bradmark Deutschland GmbH iG
Am Hang 19
85737 Ismaning

Tel: 089/96209072 0160/2626364
Fax:089/96280860

Ping version requires no NA, NM

A version of the networking utility ping that doesn't require NM or NA capabilities is one of the recent additions to the CSY Jazz Web site. The version of ping on the current e3000s demands that commonplace users be given the high powered NM/NA capabilities; the new version on Jazz at http://jazz.external.hp.com/src/ removes that requirement, although it's not yet officially supported. Lars Appel of HP's German response center did the work on the newer, sleeker version of ping. It's available in the store to disk format for easiest downloading.

Jazz also has some a new Perl script by HP Boise e3000 manager Guy Paul, scripts that provide nice disk usage information. You can look over the Perl script and sample output at http://jazz.external.hp.com/src/scripts/

Quark+ can be better than LZW for compression

Even though Quest Software released its Quark+ compression product for free earlier this year, some system administrators note that other compression utilities are available as freeware without a one-year limit on their free use. Quest's John Saylor pointed out that one of these alternatives, LZW, still doesn't do everything that Quark+ does for the e3000 user:

"The intent is to get the user community to have a reliable tool and cost effect method of distributing software freely and accurately and to motivate their ISV's into doing so.

LZW does not understand the needs of the HP 3000 community. It is a PC tool that has been ported to the 3000, just like tar, with the same problems.

Quark stores what is requested. If it is a symbolic link, the symbolic link is stored, not the file pointed to. This is an important distinction. Quark handles FIFO's equally as well. LZW ignores them.

Quark is not hamstrung with such a small vision.

It handles all the files under MPE without difficulty. This includes storing relevant Group and Account information, so that they can be created correctly when needed. What we mean here is that the standard LZW and MPE STORE restore DEFAULT accounting information not what is currently set in the account today including passwords. . MPE STORE/RESTORE does not do this, nor does LZW.

Quark allows for indirect files, which themselves contain a list of files to archive. For archiving a consistent file list, which is not easily grouped by wildcarding, this is an invaluable option.

Quark does not burden the user with a choice of either an unreadable display format, or effectively no useful information (terse only lists files it recognizes, skips files which it does not and does not show them). When QUARK gets an error accessing a file, the archive is not trashed, and archiving continues.. This cannot be said for LZW.

Quark reports its success to the CI environment by using JCWs so that an enclosing XEQ or UDC can confirm the success of the archive creation/extraction process. This is some that even STORE does not do. When one uses STORE, you must check the standard list, to verify that all files requested were actually stored. HP does not consider it an error condition when a file cannot be stored, and does not report it to the CI environment (We verified this with HP on, Feb 28, 2001)."

You can download Quark+, which costs between $900 and $9,000 when Quest is charging for it, at the Quest site: http://www.quest.com/quark_isv_program.