The 960 is a good, reliable machine, so your reluctance to replace it is
understandable.  The primary reasons for upgrading, it seems, relate to its
age.  Newer machines are much more powerful and compact and consume less
floor space, power, and cooling capacity.  The also support much larger
amounts of memory, which is important with MPE.  Maintenance agreement
prices also reflect the reduced component count and greater parts
availability for the newer machines.  Although a significant investment
would be required to upgrade, the savings in maintenance costs may offset a
good portion of that expense, especially if you compare monthly maintenance
charges to monthly depreciation.  Also, several interfaces, such as
100Base-T and fast/wide SCSI are not available for the 960.

Perhaps the most compelling reason to upgrade is the fact that there will
soon be no supported version of the operating system that can run on that
machine, and the hardware itself is either now or soon to be unsupported.
Another is the ease of upgrading, as your capacity requirements increase.
Upgrade kits (to convert a 960 to a 980) are no longer available from HP,
though they may be on the used equipment market, and getting peripherals for
the 960 will grow in difficulty.  The newer machines all support various
multiple-processor configurations, which have advantages beyond the easy
upgrade path.  For example, you don't see the situation where some high
priority runaway process hangs your entire machine.  At worst, such a
process can only use up one processor, so if you have more than one
processor, you can still get logged on and kill the offending process.

One word of warning:  when you investigate the cost of upgrading, the
greatest expense is likely to be the cost of upgrading the licenses on
third-party software.  Be sure to get those figures and include them in your
evaluation.

-----Original Message-----
From: Chris [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Sunday, January 14, 2001 10:49 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Upgrading from hp3000 (960) to hp e3000


Hi, all.

First of all I have to appolize for asking alot of quiestions to the group
lately. I'm not extremely knowledgeable with hp3000s (but I'm trying to
learn), and I have a deadline preventing me from calling busniesses by the
phone.

My question now, is after reveiwing what I could find about both the hp3000
960, and hp e3000. I'm looking at improvements on the 960 that I could
make, (eg. increase storage, memory, etc...) and limitations of this
system. And what advanages the hp e3000 would have over the 960, and the
disadvanages upgrading may have. (After all, Hp isn't exactly making the
disadvanages too public.) The system is currently being used by the
goverment, so it has a large amount of data on it and it interfaces with a
number of satalite locations by a digital network.

Any information yo can give would be helpful. Thanks you your help.