I have been following the thread on HP3000 success stories with some interest having watched a couple of our 3000s take a licking and keep on ticking. Little did I think I'd have one to contribute but then again I didn't think we'd have hurricane force winds for upwards of 8 hours around here yesterday either.

I was planning on a nice relaxing Sunday afternoon when the cell phone rang and the caller said that the substation handling our power had been knocked out by the weather. I got to work in about 1/2 hour, went into the computer room and noticed THAT SMELL. You all know it - the one that usually signals major electrical ugliness. All of the UPS units were beeping away but the 3000 (S.957) was sitting quietly in its corner apparently doing nothing. I got all of the other servers, hubs, routers, etc. shut down (right after I shut down the halon trouble alarm which was about to make my ears bleed). Went looking for the source of THAT SMELL and found what appeared to be a lingering odor near one of the internal drive cages (close to the two new drives we had just installed two weeks ago to replace the 4 Eagles which had been running 24x7x9 years without a hitch until one developed servo problems). Terrible thoughts of burned out disc controllers, fried boards, etc. rushed through my head and continued rushing through it until we got power back online 7 hours later by which time all the juice in all of the UPSs had gone away and the place was as quiet as a tomb. A bad portent?

When the power came back on and we got up the courage to power up the power conditioner to which the 3000 was connected, it was with a feeling of dread that I put power to the system. Forgive me please fellow 3000 apostles for being of such weak faith!! Everything powered up with the usual series of weird clink and sproing noises that signal our 3000's return to life. Green lights on all of the drives, a couple of weird characters on the console, CTRL-B and we had a CM>. RS and START NORECOVERY. Up comes the 3000, and what is the first thing it does? Recovers from a paper jam on the printer and starts printing out all of the reports trapped behind the jam, just like nothing at all had happened. All of the deferred reports were OK, no data loss anywhere, disc drives all checked out fine, all of our 3rd party software and truck loads of data in IMAGE and KSAM files available with no corruption, etc., etc. I still don't know where THE SMELL came from but if it came from the 3000, it didn't care. 

This is the first time I have ever kissed a machine but I should have known the 3000 would come through. I've seen it bounce back without a burp from multiple consecutive power outages, from a 5 hour brownout (lost the console on that one), and a Labor Day weekend a/c failure that had the computer room temp in the 90's during which other servers in the room died in droves.

What a superb combination of hardware and software is the 3000! Why the heck don't the powers-that-be at H-P realize what a gem they have on their hands and start treating it with the same degree of respect and admiration we, the customers, do.

Think I'll go have dinner and drink a toast to the 3000.

Howard


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** J. Howard Pringle        **  [log in to unmask]     **
** Library Systems Manager  **  phone: (414) 524-3688         **
** Waukesha Public Library  **  The opinions expressed are    **
** Waukesha, WI    53186    **  mine, Mine, ALL MINE!!(insert **
**                          **  demented laughter here)       **
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