Fiorina takes lead on HP board

After the criticism of its CEO by the analyst community we reported in our September issue, HP put even more power into Carly Fiorina's hands. As its share price fell below $90 for the first time this year, HP hand over more of its reins by naming Fiorina HP's chairwoman of the board of directors. She's the first woman to hold CEO, president and chair titles for a major technology corporation. The chairmanship of Dick Hackborn lasted less than nine months, although the legendary king of HP laser printing and consumer products will continue to sit on the HP board. Hackborn held the unusual position of non-executive chairman of HP's board; nearly all of the corporation's chairmen have been the CEO of the company, or one of its founders like Bill Hewlett.

Hewlett, by the way, made a high spot in the latest Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans. The magazine put him in 26th place overall with an estimated net worth of $9 billion. Microsoft founder Bill Gates retained his top spot with a $63 billion estimated net worth, but Oracle founder Larry Ellison was not far behind at $58 billion.

Hackborn said that handing Fiorina HP's reins "is a strong vote of confidence in Carly's leadership and the direction she has set for the company over the past 14 months. Under her stewardship, the company is now poised for accelerating growth." HP has reported profitable quarters and continued its stretch of revenue growth during that period, even though the stock price is drifting back toward its value of a year ago, when she first took over as CEO.

Hackborn stepped away from another board at the same time, resigning his position as a Microsoft director. He'd been on the Microsoft board since 1994. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen also resigned from that company's board.

HP announced a second stock repurchase plan at the same time it named Fiorina as its chairwoman. The new authorization sets aside $1 billion for "opportunistic share repurchases," which is in addition to an ongoing repurchase program -- one that HP says is "designed to offset dilution associated with employee stock plans." Shares will be purchased in the open market or in private transactions from time to time depending on market conditions.

"This new authorization will enable us to repurchase additional shares at attractive prices," said HP CFO Robert Wayman. "HP's strong cash flow enables us to accelerate share repurchases while we continue to make the investments required to fuel our growth in the Internet era."

Cash flow much be profound for the company considering its latest bid to buy. The company is negotiating to acquire Pricewaterhouse Coopers, (PWC) a multi-billion consulting firm made of two former Big Eight firms. Analysts say the purchase will help HP get a bigger share of a consulting service marketplace that's growing its revenue at 10 to 20 percent a year over the next five years. Fiorina said HP won't have any problems meeting very similar revenue growth numbers in its own quarter that ends this month.

The announcement of trying to buy PwC didn't help HP's shares on the market, however. HP said it will offer $18 billion to purchase the technology consulting arm of the firm, which Fiorina projects will have $8 billion in revenues for 2001. HP's share price dropped $18 in the weeks following the announcement of the price it is willing to pay.

HP's own consulting business — it employs 6,000 — grew its revenue 46 percent over the last year, and the PwC acquisition would double its consulting sales. It would also add 30,000 employees to a company now hovering at about 85,000. Some analysts doubt that the transition from vendor-independent IT consultants to HP employees will be an easy one for those PwC experts, to say nothing of increasing HP's employee count by more than 40 percent. But Fiorina has been bound to make dramatic changes in HP's workforce in her first year, as the HP Way continues to be remade in her image.

HP sites let you buy, configure 3000 products online

A pair of HP Web sites lets 3000 customers make better use of the Web to configure pricing for e3000s and even purchase a product online. HP has an online configurator for its hardware and operating system software at http://ecomcs05.bbndirht.external.hp.com/Staccato/ The software gives list prices in multiple currencies, so the bottom-end price tag of $44,000 for a Series 929 is more apparent. Series 9x8 systems are not in the configurator, perhaps a way of suggesting those computers are too inexpensive to worry about their price. Only the currently-sold HP e3000 line is on the site.

HP is also selling its WebWise secure server software for the e3000 online. The 3000 division is now selling software online via the HP Software Depot web site at http://www.software.hp.com. The first product to be sold this way is the HP WebWise MPE/iX Secure Web Server. Customers report that WebWise is the only product in the online catalog, and you better enter only "MPE" into the search engine to find it, among 20 other listings returned. But it's a start toward eliminating the wait for tapes or CDs when buying a product.

Lab names new section manager

After being appointed as R&D manager of CSY labs, Dave Wilde has named a successor at the division's 3000 labs in Cupertino. Longtime manager Ross McDonald was tapped to lead the growth section of the CSY engineering team.

HASS enclosures see end of life

HP is obsoleting its High Availability Storage System (HASS) rack mount enclosures on November 1, a first step to getting customers onto its new HVD products and away from what's known as Jamaica disk devices. John Painter of Computing Solutions reports, "Rack mount HASS enclosures are being obsoleted in favor of this new HVD10 product that supports faster and bigger disks. The deskside HASS will remain until some future product TBA in 2001 takes its place. The HVD10 product is more expensive to buy, but it holds more capacity in its footprint. The kicker is that you need to be careful which disks you order under MPE, because some of the disks supported in the enclosure are not supported under MPE. Meanwhile, HASS parts (disks, fans, power supplies) will be available till mid-2001 and there is the standard 5 year support life. There is also the typical HP trade-in program to move your rack mount HASS out and the HVD10 in."

Customer Dennis Heidner reported that "The downside is that the chassis is more expensive, roughly twice the cost. However you can easily put 360Gb of disk space in that box, and more as newer larger-capacity drive modules become available. There is a price break-even point, though. A single HVD10 with 180Gb is approximately the same cost as two A3312As with 144Gb of disk space."

High availability maven and HP 3000 consultant Bill Lancaster weighed in with a detailed summary of the tradeoffs between existing disks and their HVD10 successors:

"I'd like to add another caution to the use of the HVD10 disks. They come with 9, 18, 36 or 72 Gb disks, with 10 to an enclosure. This means that you can get up to 720 Gb in the space roughly that of a Jamaica.

As most of you know, one of the main majiks about MPE is how tightly integrated the whole package is. Hardware, software, operating system, file system and DBMS (Image) all play very well together (btw, this is true of other "proprietary" systems as well such as the AS400). This being the case, there is a very real, very tangible performance advantage. Those of you who have Unix/Oracle (poor, poor souls) experience the relative differences in performance every day. I've often heard (maybe because I've often said :-) that, if one was to take an HP 3000 application running VPLUS and Image and ported it to Unix under Oracle, it would take approximately four to eight times the amount of horsepower to function comparably to the HP 3000 environment.

One of the reasons this is true is because of the wonderful I/O efficiency the HP 3000 offers. For example, one of the best I/O performance metrics on the 3000 is Read Hit Percentage. This is the number of read requests satisfied in main memory. The other side of the coin is that this indicates what percentage of all physical disk reads are eliminated. For a healthy HP 3000 this number is *generally* 95 percent or greater. (For the benefit of my friend James Reynolds let me add an "It Depends" here.)

Given the fact that nearly all physical disk reads are eliminated and that nearly all disk writes are journaled through the Transaction Manager, most I/O performance problems are removed from the response time of the individual user. (As an aside, this is why a healthcare MPE disk environment won't benefit much from the new whiz-bang disk I/O technologies. The most additional physical disk I/O that can be eliminated is in the 5-10 percent range, not an amount likely to be visible to the end user).

One of the reasons disk I/O is so efficient on MPE is that there is a significant amount of disk I/O parallelism. That is, the more spindles you have, the more each spindle can be concurrently tasked with I/O requests. Given that the most heavily accessed files on any particular system are likely broken into multiple pieces (or "extents") and that these pieces are likely located on multiple spindles, the I/O subsystem will generally be multitasking on your behalf. Add to this the inherent additional multitasking associated with Mirrored Disk/iX (reads are "balanced" on both of the mirrored pairs) and you have a wonderfully efficient I/O environment.

This leads me to the essence of this posting. The driving technical issues behind the newer disk technologies do not take into account the so-called proprietary environments. In my opinion, the three main driving factors behind these new technologies are 1) Price, 2) Density and 3) High Availability, not necessarily in that order. I believe that these factors are driven largely by the Unix and Wintel markets, the lowest common denominators of computing today.

The price and density factors essentially result in fewer and fewer spindles to spread out your data over. Given that I/O performance in a Unix/Oracle world generally, by our standards anyway, sucks (a technical term) you don't generally perceive such a loss of spindles in that environment. (Before some of you Unix heads get upset with me let me add that this isn't always true. Just most of the time. :-). In MPE-land you experience it pretty dramatically.

That all being said, as you make the sojourn into the nether region of Unix- and PC-led disk hardware, please, please, please keep in mind that you have to "care-and-feed" an MPE environments performance differently. You must have a care to ensure that you never dramatically drop the number of spindles you spread your mission-critical data over. We are in the process of implementing an HVD10 disk solution for a customer. From the beginning we are 1) selecting only the 9Gb disks (fast little critters!) and 2) configuring only 50 percent of the space. This allows us to actually have a performance advantage of the customers existing disk environment by not measurable reducing the spindles and by having much faster disks.

This may seem wasteful but there isn't much price difference between the Jamaica 4.3's and the HVD10 9.0 Gb disks."

Getting the new bezels for e3000s

If you're looking for the latest fashion statement for your HP 3000s — to give them an appearance in your datacenter that emphasizes their new Internet capabilities — the new slate-grey bezels and e3000 logo might help. But adding just the new nameplate won't be possible. Dave Snow, the product planning manager for the e3000 division said that CSY looked into it, and HP's cost of handling the nameplate-only order "would make the price of the nameplates higher than most folks would want to pay. However, if you want the complete new HP e3000 look on a racked server, you can get it with the purchase of both the bezel and nameplate."

"The new Slate Gray 9x8 and 9x9KS bezels for racked mounted servers, which also include the new HP e3000 nameplates, are orderable. For 9x8 Servers you would order product number A6142A at $US 150, and for 9x9KS Servers you would order product number A6143A at $US 300. Keep in mind that non-racked servers do not come with a Slate Gray bezel.

"Racking kits which also include the Slate Gray bezel with new HP e3000 nameplates are also orderable. For 9x8 Servers the racking kit is A5859A at $US 265, and for the 9x9KS Servers the racking kit is A5860A at $US 800. These kits have the added hardware allowing a non-racked server to be racked."

Clean up Web pages with TIDY

The porting passion for e3000s remains hot, with more Posix-based tools arriving for the platform. Andreas Schmidt, author of our series on Ploticus/iX which began in September's issue, reported that he has ported "TIDY, a freeware tool to clean up Web pages for our beloved HP e3000. The homepage of Tidy/iX, the ported version for HP 3000's MPE/iX operating system, is available under http://www.hillschmidt.de/gbr/tidy.htm

Mark Wonsil, XML advocate and HP e3000 consultant at 4M Enterprises, noted: "Be forewarned:
TIDY is an instrument of the Devil, as it is a popular tool for helping Web developers move from the SGML application we call HTML to XHTML, the equivalent XML application. (See http://webreview.com/wr/pub/1999/07/16/feature/index.html for more info.)"

Southwest tops online ticket sales with e3000

Years after it pioneered the concept, Southwest Airlines continues to lead the airline industry in the sales of ticketless air tickets, every one processed through the company's HP 3000s. At one point the airline was estimating that two of every three tickets sold by the No. 5 carrier in the US were ticketless. Recently the company reported that it got more than $1 billion in passenger revenue from its Web site from January to August. It's the first airline to cross the $1 billion sales threshold inside of one year.
The HP 3000s have been taking reservations over the Web since early 1996 and led all airlines last year with $877 million in online sales, more than $200 million ahead of second-place Delta.

Analysts say that as a percentage of its overall sales, Southwest does more than three times the online ticketless business of its larger competitors. The analysts say one of the reasons is that the Southwest site is easy to use and functional.

More intelligent FTP between 3000s

After our September article on using the new FTP capability between 3000s appeared, one reader wondered if the SET BINARY or SET ASCII commands were ever required. Author Wirt Atmar replied:

Because we only use MPE filespace names in our organization, and because this is an HP 3000-to-HP 3000 file transfer in this use, and because such transfers are "magical" on the HP 3000, you don't have to specify binary or ASCII. Rather FTP on the HP 3000 recognizes that one HP 3000 is talking to another and transfers all of the MPE file attributes with the file, building the new file on the target machine perfectly without you having to do any work at all.

Whoever put this attribute into the HP 3000's FTP certainly did a nice job. I'm not only impressed by the ease by which it works, but its speed as well."

Tip: How to introduce different libraries for test purposes

MPE Forum executive committee member Duane Percox of QSS passed on another tip for 3000 programmers, one that details the technique of making XL access flexible at run time:

"It's common knowledge that you can specify the NM library (XL) for a NM executable by either linking/altprog an XL list or by specifying it at run time with the ';xl=' parameter. This allows you to use a specific named XL instead of the acct/group XL feature (;lib=).

What isn't common knowledge is that the file names in the ';xl=' list can be formal names preceded with an '*'. File equations can then be used to direct the loader to the specific library (XL) you wish.

For example, you can specify ;xl="*mylib" at link time and resolve the library at run time by issuing a file equation: FILE MYLIB=...

This is a handy way to introduce different libraries for testing purposes when the application system doesn't allow you to easily override the ;xl= at run time.

Also, if you specify multiple formal names like this: xl="*liba,*libb,*libc" then you can make allowances for multiple libraries even though you currently only have one (1). If the library is not needed (or available) you just file equate to $NULL.

In our application we compile/link our NM programs with this: ;XL="*QSSLIBXA,*QSSLIBXB,*QSSLIBXC,*QSSLIB"

QSSLIB contains all of our shared utility routines. The other libraries can be used by particular applications that use an XL for application level shared code. Note: we put QSSLIB at the end of the list because the MPE loader is a one pass forward-only resolving loader and application level libraries will usually be calling routines from QSSLIB.

Oracle: ...and the horse it rode in on

After reporting on the retreat of Oracle from the e3000 marketplace in our September issue, it looks as if the company might be leaving just in time. Oracle recently implemented a pricing plan that uses a measure called the universal power unit (UPU). Customers can pay based on how fast a machine is, or they can choose an enterprise price. Customers in Oracle user groups have complained about the performance-based pricing of Oracle, but feel they have little leverage, since these customers consider the database an industry standard. This year's HP 3000 Division Contributor Award winner Bill Lancaster suggested at HP World that the 3000 customers' migration plan carry the above name.