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Latest MPE/iX 5.5 software a preview of this fall's 6.0 release

The PowerPatch 5 release of MPE/iX 5.5 is being shipped during August, after HP circulated the release’s Communicator documentation to thousands of sites early in the month. The technical document came along with an order form for software that improves IMAGE/SQL performance, Telnet stability and big disk drive support.

PowerPatch 5 is being so named because it doesn’t need a separate subsys tape. It’s also got advanced testing of its Year 2000 compliance.

“If it’s a subsys tape it’s called an Express, and if it’s just a PowerPatch tape it’s called a PowerPatch,” said CSY’s Dave Snow. “There’s no subsys tape, but there may be patches on the PowerPatch tape that affect the subsystems.”

HP is increasing the maximum size of IMAGE datasets from 40Gb to 80Gb in the release. Dynamic Master Dataset Expansion (MDX) makes its official debut on PowerPatch 5, giving shops with 24x7 operations one less reason to take databases offline for capacity changes.

EMC Symmetrix disk drive arrays now support the SRDF functionality for HP 3000s by using PowerPatch 5. The feature copies all data specified by the user to a target Symmetrix system for shadowed access if an EMC drive fails or the HP 3000 goes down. The Symmetrix Remote Data Facility then copies the information back to the original Symmetrix system when service is reestablished.

HP is positioning SRDF as a way to access data after shadowing has stopped and the volume is mounted. Load balancing and clustering are better served with the Shareplex/Netbase software from Quest or HP. EMC supports SRDF, with HP acting as front-end phone contact.

HP is making it possible to boot off 9- and 18-Gb disk drives with PowerPatch 5, but the 3000 will only recognize the first 4Gb of such a drive when it’s designated as LDEV 1. “We realize this is in many ways a short term band-aid,” said HP product planning manager Dave Snow. “We’ll ultimately fix it, but we felt it was important to be able to allow folks to be able to use those drives as LDEV 1 when they initially ordered the system.” This ultimate fix won’t be available in the 6.0 release, Snow added.

PowerPatch 5 is Year 2000 compliant, and HP has enhanced the compliance with additional testing against HP software. “When we announced that we were Year 2000 with PowerPatch 4, there was no approved testing model for Year 2000 activity within HP,” Snow said. “Everyone did their own thing, which is not to say we didn’t have a thorough test. HP has put together a very strict compliance definition for Year 2000 support since late last year, and we’ve gone through our MPE subsystems and re-tested again for compliance with this stricter standard, and found we were still compliant.”

HP did not make changes in the functions of its APIs for Year 2000 that called by customers’ programs, Snow said. “We did find a couple of minor little problems, which we corrected in the PowerPatch tape. Customers will need to evaluate these changes and decide on a case-by-case basis whether these changes require application retesting.” He said the areas of change will be noted on HP’s Year 2000 Web site, , around August 4 (We also will summarize these changes in this issue’s FlashPaper.) The new patches are required for DCE/3000, Allbase/SQL, the Architected Interface (AIF) for MPE/iX and several compilers and tools, such as RPG. Customers can find a more complete explanation of the HP definition of Year 2000 compliance at the main Web page.

HP is finally releasing the IO extender capability for the 9x9 systems with the PowerPatch 5 release. “Lots of people wondered if this ever was going to happen,” Snow said. “We had a limited set of knowledgeable engineers who had to work on several different issues at once. This one got pushed to the back for a little bit.”

Snow said HP felt it was extremely important to have the IO extenders shipping by the time the Series 989 came out, since that computer has only four chassis IO slots instead of the eight in the rest of the 9x9 line. “It became even more important that there was some way of getting more IO into the 9x9 platform,” Snow said.

One change in PowerPatch 5 will result in better database performance. IMAGE/SQL gets a finer method of doing row-level locking with the release. This means that better concurrency of access can be achieved when using manual masters. Updating the masters with multiple entries requires less locking than before, because the database can lock with better granularity

“At the beginning we locked a large portion, and this time around we implemented a finer granularity of locking,” Snow said. “Less of the manual masters are being locked.

Patches improving the stability of Telnet/iX that didn’t make the PowerPatch 4 cut are also a part of the PowerPatch 5 release. But Snow added that “some non-general release patches for Telnet/iX that are still in Beta test have not been included.”

All of the contents of PowerPatch 5 will be offered in the mainline release of MPE/iX 6.0, which includes some new features such as multiple job queues. HP continues to stage its enhancements through PowerPatch and Express releases, and consolidates most of the new features in mainline releases

“We’ve actually used 6.0 as a culmination of a lot of PowerPatches and Expresses,” said CSY’s Dave Snow. “They’re not implemented via patches, they’re implemented via source-level changes.”

Expect to be able to order 6.0 on October 1, Snow said. “It’s been shippable in the mid-October time frame for several months now,” he said, “so it looks pretty solid.” At least one significant improvement to FTP/iX will be available in the 6.0 release. The software for file transfers will supported under the inetd daemon, to ease network administration of FTP services.