HP’s much anticipated Superdome announcement may not have an official MPE component yet, but the highest end of mainframes could have a link with the 3000 market in the future.

The system’s $1 million-and-up price tag seems to keep it out of the budget of more conservative HP 3000 shops. But HP CEO Carly Fiorina neglected to mention the biggest of HP iron is capable of working with MPE/iX, although HP hasn’t announced its plans to host the operating system on the 32-processor unit.

An IT manager with beta-test experience on Superdome said at HP World that he believes there’s no reason Superdome can’t work with MPE/iX. “It’s PA-RISC hardware,” he said. “I asked our technical contact from HP why it wouldn’t run with MPE. He replied to me, ‘Yes, why wouldn’t it run MPE?’ ” In a future version, the computer will use its advanced partitioning to run more than one operating environment at once, according to HP’s presentations.

Customers at the HP World conference asked both e3000 Product Planning Manager Dave Snow and R&D Manager Dave Wilde of the Commercial Systems Division (CSY) where the 3000 might play in the million-dollar product. Both said that current HP 3000 systems that could ship before Superdome would be more likely candidates for multiple operating system partition capabilities including MPE/iX — and a better performance fit for the typical 3000 customer.

“It’s a very powerful machine that has a lot of other functionality too, “ Snow said of Superdome. “From a power perspective, we don’t see a big demand in the 3000 marketplace today. Maybe tomorrow, but not today.”

Snow said that CSY doesn’t even support HP’s V-Class systems for the MPE/iX today, and Superdome is supposed to be replacing those V-Class Unix systems running HP-UX. “In terms of supplying performance over our 997 servers of today, 4-way N-Class is going to have greater than 30 percent performance, and that allows us to go to 5-, 6-, 7- and 8-way for even higher performance at future points in time.”

Superdome “from a pure performance perspective is a possibility in the future, but you should not look for it in the 2001 timeframe.” But the system “also brings other interesting things to the table, like its multiple partitioning ability, that allows differing operating systems. One can have 64 different instances of an OS inside the Superdome platform, each with a sort of firewall from the other. This is an area that we are going to be looking at. It’s a technology that in time may make it’s way down into our midrange platform, the N-Class.”