I thought many of you in OpenMPE land would find this email from
Denys Beauchemin interesting.  It from a separate discussion and
reference an article by John Burke and a letter from HP about SCSI disk
drives.  Perhaps some of the third party hardware vendors would care to
chime in with their prospective on this topic.

Thanx,
    Jon Backus



-----Original Message-----
From: Denys Beauchemin
Sent: Wednesday, July 02, 2003 12:15 PM
Subject: Re: Why HP disk drives


Perhaps the guys at CSY haven't been keeping up with current events so
here are some news flashes for you:

1- The HP 3000 has been cancelled and its EOL is in 4 months.
2- HP does not currently support a sizable portion (majority?) of the HP
3000 in production.
3- There has not been a High Voltage Differential SCSI (what you
amusingly call FWSCSI) disk drive built in over 3 years.
4- Disk drives have a very finite life; they spin for a long time and
then they stop.  Forever.
5- Many shops will be running their applications on HP 3000 systems for
many years in the future.

John's article was entitled "SCSI is SCSI."  He did not invent the
title, that same phrase has been bandied around for years on HP3000-L
and just about everywhere in the industry.  What Mike is now saying is
that for the HP 3000, SCSI is NOT SCSI, just like 100Base-Tx is NOT
100Base-Tx, 440 MHz CPU chips are NOT 440MHz CPU chip, and probably RAM
is NOT RAM (wait, I remember those days.)

Whilst I know there are many other people who have done and are doing
the same things as I, I will only speak for myself here. Others can
speak up if they want.  When HP announced the EOL of the 3000, it became
readily apparent that a large portion of current users would not migrate
in time to coincide with EOL or EOS.  They were going to remain on the
3000 for the foreseeable future.  I realized that one of the greatest
obstacles to their success in this plan was hardware, specifically
peripherals like the disk
drives.  (I even wrote a large article in HP World magazine about that.)
I have been successfully using HVD-SCSI and SE-SCSI disk
drives in our systems and these disk drives are not HP-branded devices.
I have found that Seagate is now producing new technology
disk drives that can be used to successfully replace aging or defunct
HP-branded SE-SCSI disk drives on the HP 3000.  I have also successfully
tested HVD-to-SE and HVD-to-LVD converters and HVD-to-FC routers on
various HP 3000s.  These things all worked, because SCSI is SCSI.  All
this gives hope to the many sites that are getting ready to step into
homesteading in 4 months.  Actually, many sites have been homesteading
for years.

I do not know what is in this secret letter being written by HP that
purports to debunk John's article, which gathered together in one place
all sorts of articles, postings and talks about how to extend the life
of your HP 3000.  I do not know what the nature of the secret ingredient
is for the HP-branded disk drives, which are no longer made, BTW, but if
it's something more than an HP part number or a bar code, it certainly
has not shown up in anyone's site of which I am aware.  If it is
something having to do with diagnostics or preventive maintenance, it is
a non-issue.  Who cares about running a "non-HP supported" configuration
when HP doesn't even support the product line any more?

Unless this secret ingredient is also present in disk drives that were
installed in HP-UX boxes, I find it hard to believe that Seagate or
other disk drive manufacturers would even consider altering their drives
for such a small amount of disk drives.  Just like I find it hard to
believe that HP produced 110MHz PA-RISC CPUs just for the HP 3000 sales.
:)

HP sells its HP-branded disk drives at a very hefty premium.  They want
$3300 for a SCSI disk drive that can be bought for $300 from Seagate.
That is not dissimilar to the hefty prices for memory ($6000 for 1GB
from HP, $370 for the same from Kingston,) and for the 100Base-Tx LAN
cards.  The latter costs several thousand dollars in an obscene
combination of software and hardware, when a far more sophisticated
10/100/1000 LAN card for a server from Intel costs less than $200.

If the letter from CSY even implies that for the HP 3000, SCSI is not
SCSI, which it would have to in order to contradict John's article and
if it does not give homesteaders ideas and strategies to support their
systems beyond EOL and EOS without having to buy ancient and long-used
and abused HP-branded disk drives, then I will view it as a final "screw
you, suckers."  It will be the equivalent of HP CSY saying "so long and
thanks for all your money."

If this is the case, the major disaster for HP 3000 users is not that
the HP 3000 has been cancelled but rather that it was not cancelled soon
enough.

Denys