This month HP’s e3000 division (CSY) made it easier to deploy its operating system that supports large files and extra memory, starting shipments of the first PowerPatch for the 6.5 release of MPE/iX.

Designed to serve the needs of some of HP’s largest e3000 sites, 6.5 has been available since May from HP, but it is installed at few sites on a production basis. Most system managers and IT directors won’t install a new OS release on their e3000s until it’s been through enough tests to generate a PowerPatch, HP’s collection of general release bug patches on a single tape.

Release manager Aida Silva said she expected to begin shipping PowerPatch 1 for 6.5 on Sept. 5. Customers can get the PowerPatch by requesting it from the HP Response Center support operation. PowerPatch 1 won’t be sent automatically to all e3000 sites.

At the same time, HP has set an end-of-support date for the MPE/iX release in widest use by the customer base. The 5.5 version of the OS will go off support at the end of 2000, so e3000 sites will have to move to a newer release. HP hopes that will be 6.5, but it has also extended the support life for 6.0 to April 30, 2002.

The new PowerPatch doesn’t contain any official enhancements to MPE/iX beyond what has been available in the base 6.5 release of the OS. But that base 6.5 release brings the first bundled version of the Apache/iX Web server, support for the Java 2 Software Developer’s Kit, and included support for Lightweight Directory Access Protocols (LDAP) for standardized access to X.500 network directories.

HP also extended the 3000’s memory capacity and file sizes with 6.5. Series 997 Servers can support up to 16Gb of memory, and Series 929/030, 939/030, 979 and 989 servers can support up to 8Gb. File sizes can be as large as 128Gb in this release, up from 4Gb. In addition, HP has increased the number of TCP connections to 20,000, boosted the number of disk spindles supported from 255 to 511, and increased the number of compatibility mode data segments four-fold.

The increases help the e3000s at the top of the line — the 10- and 12-way Series 997s — improve performance as much as 40 percent over the 8-way 997s running MPE/iX 6.0. HP has also increased the size of the Transaction Manager buffer by a factor of eight in the 6.5 release, to reduce the chance of databases stalling in heavy volume environments.

One notable bug fix is not included in the PowerPatch. The repair of DBUTIL to close a potential security breech — patch TIXLX74 for TurboIMAGE — still requires a separate patch.

HP is issuing repairs to its new STM diagnostic support tool in the PowerPatch. The STM would hang some systems when a shutdown was requested. In other instances, TERMDSM wouldn’t take a dump of a requested port. In some heavily loaded e3000s, none of the STM tools would run.