Symposiums scale for new platforms

HP updates migration sizing at broader Interex conferences

Advice and attendance at this spring’s Interex Solution Symposiums offered evidence on whether size matters. While the conferences got expanded to subjects outside of their HP 3000 roots, audience size did not grow. Meanwhile, content in 3000-related sessions included fresh advice on the size of 9000s which will replace 3000s.

The meetings in San Jose, Calif. and Morristown, N.J. drew fewer than 100 attendees each, with customers on hand numbering less than 60 in either venue. Interex hoped to attract a larger audience for the event by including talks on Tru64, storage, HP-UX and Windows 2003. HP 3000 sessions continued to lead the field with attendees, but no session of any kind could muster two dozen IT pros in the audience.

Though the meetings fell short of mindshare, they gave those on hand plenty to think about. HP’s Kevin Cooper updated his talk on sizing HP 9000 systems for a migration, telling an audience that nearly filled his room that Itanium system performance now merits consideration by 3000 shops making a move.

Cooper talked about results from HP’s rx5670, on the lower end of HP’s midrange Itanium-based servers. This HP Integrity server has been benchmarked and delivered the industry’s best OLTP results for a 4-way system. “For a lot of MPE people, a 4-way system might be the kind of system you’re thinking about,” Cooper said. “It’s worth considering for 3000 migrations.”

Apps which access large databases benefit the most from direct 64-bit addressing, a feature of the Integrity servers. “That’s where you’re going to get your biggest performance benefit from Itanium,” Cooper said.

Choose database wisely

Choice of processor platform does not lead the concerns which HP 3000 sites have about configuring a replacement for their servers, however. Many customers grapple with the question of size for a 9000 replacing a 3000. Cooper said a good rule of thumb is to install a server with twice as many processors and four times as much memory as the 3000 it replaces.

“3000s just happened to run on not much memory, and you could use most of it to cache your database,” Cooper said. “That isn’t the case on every operating system.” An application in HP tests that ran best with 1GB of memory on a 3000 ran best with 4GB on HP-UX systems.

Those numbers relied on Eloquence, from Marxmeier Software, a database choice that Cooper touted as being most efficient with HP 9000 resources. “Choosing a database is the biggest single factor in performance in moving to another platform,” Cooper said. Language choice, and the operating system itself, are not as much of a factor in migrated application performance.

Cooper explained that applications that are moved away from the 3000 use one of three strategies as they access data. IMAGE wrappers can do a level of translation on an intercepted data call. Customers or consultants can convert IMAGE calls to native SQL calls. Or Eloquence can provide access on HP-UX, by using direct calls to IMAGE intrinsics.

“Eloquence is a relational database internally, but the native access is through calling IMAGE intrinsics,” Cooper said. “It looks like IMAGE on the outside. This decision of database is the big question.” Calls that are not migrated carefully have their linkages lost, and selects then read an entire table, “and you’ve thrown away your chain.”

Cooper said his testing showed that when Eloquence required 125 percent of the 3000’s performance, Oracle needed 250 percent. Locking strategy needs to be carefully planned, since page-level locks are the default in relational databases, and IMAGE apps usually use row-level locks.

“Some people said they took out all their locks, and let the native Oracle locking work,” Cooper said. IMAGE apps tend to lock only around updates, and not around reads. Database tuning is essential to success while using Oracle. “Early adopters strongly advise to get a database administrator who knows how to tune the chosen database environment. People who were successful did not rely on their existing 3000 staff to do Oracle internals tuning. That’s a field all in itself.”

Attendees in the audience added that buying enough free memory for a database administrator to use was essential to attaining acceptable performance.

Conference performance

Despite the limited number of attendees at the conferences, those on hand found useful networking opportunities and advice about unfamiliar environments. Bob Lewandowski, IT Director for software distributor ASAP Software, said that sessions on Storage Area Networks “gave me a list of questions to ask” when he moved on to setting up storage for his company’s .NET PC environment. Lewandowski said his firm was migrating away from the HP 3000 “because I have a billion-dollar business to run, and I can’t go without support.” He also allowed that one of the only advantages he expected to see was that the platforms across his organization would be the same once his migration is completed.

Many of the customers and consultants representing customer sites were on hand to learn more about non-3000 choices. But one said she didn’t think the changes in the offing would help her smaller agribusiness clients. “Life can be so good when the operating system stops changing,” she said of MPE/iX’s stable profile.

Several HP 3000 experts were invited to the West Coast conference gratis at the last minute, to help round out networking and information exchange. Gavin Scott of Allegro was one of these, and he offered a view of the 3000 homesteader’s future beyond 2006.

“’Workaround’ is going to be the watchword in the post-2006 era,” Scott said. “Not enhancements to MPE, but ways to keep it stable.”

Homesteading customers dominated the profile of HP 3000 users at conferences, if the definition of “not yet migrating” could apply to the homestead profile. Paul Edwards, a presenter whose homesteading talk led session attendence at the East Coast Symposium, could find no customers among his audience who were underway with a migration. Less than half were planning or investigating.

Migration destinations other than HP’s platforms have had to struggle for airtime at Interex conferences, but sponsorship opportunities bridged the gap at the East Coast meeting. PIR Group, which offers a COBOL migration plan that includes IBM’s iSeries hardware as well as Unix destinations, sponsored the last day’s lunch at the East Coast meeting. PIR’s Christian Schneider set up his company’s booth during the 15 minutes of speaking time he was allotted with lunchtime attendees. “We talked about ourselves as the COBOL alternative they don’t want you to hear about,” Schneider said — although those at lunch were not served up specifics about IBM’s platform.

Interex didn’t have an immediate reaction to the turnout at the Symposiums, according to Edwards, who helped plan the content. The future of the conferences, which fell short of break-even numbers, hasn’t been decided yet by Interex, he said, after speaking with the user group’s advocacy chief Debbie Lawson.