Support extension to help migration, homestead

HP moves out end of MPE/iX 6.5 support to December 2004

HP’s 3000 customers will face fewer changes in their operations over the next two years since the company extended the end of support date for a popular release of MPE/iX. The 6.5 operating system that was scheduled to become unsupported by HP on December 31, 2003 now will be eligible for HP support through all of 2004.

Dave Wilde, business manager for the HP 3000 group at the reorganized company, said the extension is designed to serve the customers who aren’t ready to migrate away from the system in the immediate future, as well as those looking at a migration in 2005 or later.

“We felt like we could do this for affected customers, to give them more flexibility,” Wilde said. “For customers who are upgrading or consolidating, those people feel that getting the latest hardware will make their site more supportable. For homesteading people, this gives them more flexibility on how they plot their road map.”

Pushing out the customers’ shift to 7.0, or the soon-to-be released 7.5 environment, helps give HP a better chance to continue quality work on its MPE patch engineering, too. The 6.5 release extension gives customers a place to stay for a longer period of time, while HP can reduce the number of mainline releases it is supporting to three.

“We’re planning to provide support long enough that everything we do flows down to it,” Wilde said. “We had to decide how many operating environments we were going to support at any point. We were concerned we were going to be supporting too many environments for too long, and wind up with unsupportable environments for the customers.”

The 6.5 release has been out in the customer base since the spring of 2000, and even its first production-grade version, PowerPatch 1, has been running nearly two years. But many customers chose to upgrade their MPE/iX 5.5 systems to 6.0 in the fall of 2000, sticking with a release that supported all of their peripherals including HP-IB devices.

During the next 18 months, however, the customer base has gradually shifted toward the 6.5 release, preparing for this October’s end of support for 6.0. HP extended the support deadline for 6.0 twice over that period for a total of six extra months, but considers this October 31 to be the end for its final release that supports HP-IB.

The extension of 6.5 takes on added significance in a Transition era. At almost five years of support, 6.5 will hold a record for longest supported MPE/iX release. But the product line has never been in a period where customers must budget for migration expenses. Reducing the number of shifts to newer releases can hold those expenses down.

Customers began asking for more life in 6.5 earlier this year. Clark County Nevada’s Rich Rankin asked HP at this year’s Solutions Symposium if the vendor would consider extending support of 6.5 to the end of 2006. Like some companies, the county hopes to save the organization millions of dollars in migration costs by staying on its current MPE release.

“Companies like us can re-appropriate the money we’d spend on migration to MPE 7.0 and 7.5 toward the replacement of our existing applications,” said Rankin.