I just got done reading the fine article in the 3000News/Wire edited by
Ron Seybold about HP's decision to use the HP3000 to host their Heart
order-processing and payroll applications. Ron's editorial column indi-
cated that this decision might help allay our concerns about HP's commit-
ment to the future development of the 3000. If HP installed a couple
million $ worth of 3000 equipment, that is good news indeed. But look more
closely and see how "committed" HP sounds to this.....
 
There were three items specifically which put a damper on my initial
enthusiasm:
 
1) When asked why the 3000 was used instead of the 9000 for these apps,
Jim Murphy, the project leader, said that 2 years ago when the project
started, they had little internal HP-UX programming experience, and
lots of 3000 experience. He reiterated that point again at the end of
the article. To me this implies that if there had been more UNIX folks
around (like there might be today, 2 years later), the would have chosen
a 9000? The only *technical* reason Murphy gave for using the 3000 was
that the JCL control was stronger for things like error recovery and such.
To me, that is NOT where the 3000 clobbers the 9000......transaction speed
and itegrity is.
 
2) which brings me to point #2. The Heart application, all 850 GIGABYTES
of it, is still in FLAT FILES! What? Possibly the largest HP3000 appli-
cation in the world, and there's no IMAGE database???? Sure, maybe
they have tied their critical flat files to the XM with FCONTROL calls,
but I just cannot imagine such a large system without a DBMS somewhere. (The
payroll application does now use IMAGE, but the Heart system still
does not, apparently). So they have not tied themselves to a database.
 
3) Much, if not all, of the app is in POSIX. According to the article,
this was done so that the new software would run under MPE/iX or under
HP-UX. If HP was firm on its 3000 decision, why would this extra step
be necessary? And how is it HP had no HP-UX experience, but they had
enough POSIX experience to get the project done? HP didn't even write
the POSIX shell, for crying out loud, so they could not have had much
internal experience with it at all!
 
 
Do these three things, taken together, lead anyone besides me to feel like HP
is reconsidering its decision to use HP 3000's internally? Now they have
HP-UX experience to draw on; they have written the new app in POSIX so
it can run on HP-UX without major change; and they have not converted
their data for IMAGE. To me that sounds like they are planning on a
temporary stay......
 
Not once in the interview did Murphy say they chose the 3000 because they
thought it was the better OS to run their business (except for the minor
nod to the JCL of MPE, which I consider a fairly trivial advantage
compared to MPE's strengths vs. UNIX).
 
Maybe it's just paranoia on my part, but I will not be surprised if
those 3000's don't become victims of the field lobotomy to a 9000 in
the short-term sometime.
 
--
Mark Landin
System Manager
Superstar Satellite Entertainment
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