SIB solicits better future for MPE/iX

Latest ballot includes tactical, strategic requests

HP has been encouraging 3000 customers to ask for enhancements to the computer’s operating system, so the 2004 version of the Systems Improvement Ballot has appeared online this month. The ballot includes a section HP didn’t request, though: a place to vote for improvements to HP’s strategy regarding the computer it has stopped selling.

Previous SIB votes have mixed specific requests for new functionality with pleas for things like uncrippled processors or a way to give third parties the power to transform HP 9000s into HP 3000s. Paul Edwards, a new OpenMPE board member and leader of the MPE/iX SIB effort, said that the MPE Forum that crafts the SIB wants a place for both engineered improvements and better strategy. Although HP has said no to requests to things like making MPE/iX 7.0 run on 9x7 systems, or giving N-Class 3000s the same horsepower as their HP 9000 counterparts, “no doesn’t mean not ever,” Edwards said of the strategic issues.

“We need to continue to keep these items out there, because otherwise people will think we’ve forgotten about them, or HP has forgotten about them,” Edwards said. Strategic issues are those “that are more of a business decision for HP.” Another, longer Tactical list of 18 proposals “are ones that require some amount of HP R&D effort, like gigabit LANs.”

Any customer can vote, and each voter will cast ballots for both lists. In this way the MPE Forum hopes to make the customers’ desires known for better HP business decisions, but satisfy HP’s need to know what it needs to consider for its engineering resource allocations.

“The votes you cast on one list don’t affect the other list,” Edwards said. In years past, the SIB’s efforts to poll on 3000 strategic issues pulled voters’ focus away from the tactical engineering projects.

Edwards said the ballot now includes new items for R&D effort from HP, as well as some that HP hasn’t gotten to in the past. Prior strategic requests are also on the ballot, “because we wanted to see if people still have strong feelings about things like the processor uncrippling.”

Balloting is set to conclude in mid-March, to give the Forum time to tally and analyze the results before the late March Interex Solutions Symposium in California. The ballot was posted online at the Interex Web site, www.interex.org/advocacy/survey/mpesib2004.html.

Strategic issues new to the ballot include the means to allow the conversion of used HP 9000 computers into their HP 3000 counterparts, in order to increase the size of the used HP 3000 equipment pool. The ballot also asks HP to give customers a clue about MPE’s future: “By the second half of 2004, announce the decision for whether the MPE/iX source code will be licensed to one or more third parties.”

Another new strategic request is to allow SCSI disk drive firmware level updating. “A new procedure needs to be supplied for all users, regardless of HP support status, to update the [disks’] firmware, downloaded from the ITRC, on an MPE/iX machine.” Suitable disk drives are on the used marketplace, but the devices sometimes don’t have updated firmware.

Tactical enhancements for the system on the ballot include to enhance MPE/iX to allow applications to send SCSI commands directly to SCSI devices; keeping Java on the HP 3000 up to date with the most current version available; and improvements in local and system-level CI variables.

The Tactical list also includes support of gigabit LANs for the HP 3000. Edwards said that networking project is so big that it might even be considered a Strategic request.

One tactical proposal would extend the utility of non-HP printers for 3000 network printing, by adding a pcl_supported = false option in the system’s printer configuration file. The request wants to keep HP’s engineering simple: “No device status checking and reporting, failure recovery, imbedded PCL sequences, or handling of CCTL information would be done,” the request reads. “The customer would be responsible for ending each of the spool files with a form feed command to flush the last page. HEADON would not be supported.”

Balloting ended March 12.