Instead of fooling with the 3000's software, the Charon product provides a pre-configured MPE/iX disk image. This is an LDEV1 system disk, but it’s not a physical device. It’s an virtualized disk file, running on a Linux server, which the emulator then reads when it boots up MPE/iX. Once you have this LDEV1, you populate it with the software on your 3000 system -- specialized databases, configurations for IO, the works. The wizardry comes in making an Intel server which runs Linux -- the host OS of the emulator package -- behave the same as an HP 3000 server. MPE/iX is changed in no way. This is why there've been no lingering reports of the emulator failing to run an MPE application or a utility.

Emulator technology has a reputation from more than a decade ago of being a horsepower hog. But the first two generations of emulation have blown past us all, and now Stromasys is beyond instruction-by-instruction interpretation. It’s well past dynamic instruction translation, which pre-fetched a platform’s CPU instructions, then translated them into target platform code. That translation might have been called dynamic, but it was only suitable for entry-level to midrange systems.

Stromasys has left all of MPE and IMAGE’s software stack alone, and patched nothing. The product’s task is to use the latest, multi-level translation technology. Stromasys perfected this technology — the third generation of emulation — while it served users of the VAX hardware who wanted to continue to run OpenVMS after HP-Digital stopped selling VAXes.

Stromasys GM Bill Driest explained that this third generation emulation takes the 3000 source hardware instruction code, then moves it to a specially developed intermediate language code that’s optimized for cross-platform virtualization. Finally, it’s translated to target platform code to let Intel’s broad, standard family of Xeon processors do the HP PA-RISC work that happened inside 3000s.

What this means is that the software doesn’t have to evolve to increase its performance. It’s a good thing, because MPE/iX is not going to evolve beyond its current rock-solid release. HP won’t permit the source code holders to create new versions of MPE. IMAGE isn’t getting new functions. Believe or not, that’s a good thing. Nothing was broken with MPE or IMAGE except for HP’s model to sell the software at the heart of a 3000.

Instead, Driest says that Charon will rely on hardware improvements to get to the next level of performance.

I’ve been in the industry 30-plus years, and the industry has learned there’s one thing to do when there’s new technology that comes out. You chase it. You migrate, you port, you replace.  We’ve turned that paradigm completely upside down. Why should we always modify the software to take advantage of hardware innovations? Why can’t we adapt the hardware to fit our applications? What you’ve done up to now is create the exact same system you had before, but on a new box. We think there are other options here.

Namely, that’s to use the increasing horsepower of Intel’s designs — the ones driven by commodity markets — to employ additional cores in processors and lift up MPE/iX performance. Soon enough there will be Charon models to match performance of the biggest 3000 HP ever sold. Eventually the rise of hardware power will take this OS faster than HP ever could.

But Driest recognizes that Charon itself has evolution in front of it. “Some of this emulator technology should become self-aware, so the emulator decides, ‘I know what I need from this hardware I’m hosted upon. Why don’t I carve out the amount of memory I need from the new host platform, and give it to MPE. No need for having the level of expertise to do that level of maintenance. And where are monitoring and reporting tools? They’re all around the place, but they’re not inside our product.

Stromasys has plans, Driest said, to enhance its virtualization-emulation products with all of that. In the meantime, however, the company could use some introductions to customers. Stromasys and the community can benefit from having the same people entrusted with MPE/iX system support to guide a 3000 site into the world of virtualization.

Those are pros like the reseller who asked about IMAGE being a part of Charon HPA/3000. They know where the prospects are who use use 3000s. They’ve become trusted advisors in this independent era of transition. While Charon still requires expertise for its implementation, these resellers and support companies are the next place the solution needs to go. Technical leaps are important, but virtualization needs to cross a threshold of trust.

IMAGE jumbo datasets were supposed to get eclipsed by LargeFile datasets. HP was fixing a critical bug in LFDS and needed beta testers, something that was harder to come by for HP. LargeFiles remain less robust than jumbos for most customers. LFDS repairs consumed precious resoures in the database lab, all while HP tried to fix a data corruption problem.

HP sold off more than 400 acres in South Texas as layoffs started to mount up. CEO Mark Hurd set aside $236 million in severance pay. Sun offered up a open source program for Solaris, begging the question about when open source practices could be applied to MPE/iX. This week OpenVMS managers examined what stood in the way of VMS becoming open source. 

Even though parts of MPE/iX are well outside of HP's labs, the whole wooly bunch of source, millions of lines, isn't a candidate for open source like the Sun project. But it might be, someday. 

We looked at whether a transition era demanded the same rigorous HP testing of beta enhancements and patches. "We heard HP say they'd be satisfied with one site's beta test report, a comment offered when HP engineers discussed the lack of beta-test sites last summer at HP World." we reported. "When the labs closed in 2008, software that languished in Patch Jail was bailed out. HP was seeking beta testers "who want to try out the new networked printing enhancements for the HP 3000."

More than three years later, Suraci's shop licensed MPE/iX source code to produce patches and workarounds. Six other licensees got what the Sun customers seemed to want: source. Gilles Schipper of GSA, one of the longest-tenured support providers, said HP code was not key.

"I don't think [access to HP's source] is a necessary thing for the 3000 to maintain its reliability," Schipper told us. "I'd like to see it happen, because it may allay the concerns of some customers out there." 

That's a lesson that the OpenVMS customer might embrace, with all the direct talk of parts of the OS built by third parties or created in HP Labs.

We've been so grateful for the support of the community, especially our sponsors, in keeping the blog the leading source of HP 3000 community news and experience. Thanks for making us a pick to click in the 3000 world since before the days of a user group bankruptcy.

It started more simply, of course. A little patch of the house, which serves as a yoga studio and writing classroom, had its older wood floor ruined in a flooding rain nearly two years ago. The rot crept in and so it became time to replace it. This might be the kind of "it's broken" event that triggered a migration or two -- back in the days when living in the comfy house of MPE built by HP was still an option. When Hewlett-Packard tossed its pail of water onto the floor of your community, the vendor started off its campaign with success stories about transitions.

Sadly, these were as disingenuous as the ones HP offered to VMS customers this week. At the same time it was tolling the bell for its VMS business, HP's added that OpenVMS is great enough to power Accuweather and the Singapore Stock Exchange. Except the vendor doesn't want Accuweather to run on OpenVMS more than seven years longer -- because the OS support is not scheduled to survive beyond 2020, according to HP's decree. Perhaps just long enough to collect support money for another seven years. After one VMS user noted that Accuweather was an old story placed in odd context, said Neil Rieck,

Yes, that Accuweather blurb in the middle of the announcement was very much like a corporate version of the Jedi-hand-wave ("These are not the droids you are looking for.") In HP's case "we have no intentions of spending another cent on OpenVMS, but continue feeling good while running a has-been OS." What I'd be more interested in finding out is how the Singaporean stock exchange --- which only a few months ago moved to VMS --- is feeling right now.

So here at Newswire Headquarters we're weathering the last five percent of a project that will require more than three months of displacement, losses and unexpected expense. Unlike the efforts that migrators are making, all we're doing is working to keep open three businesses' offices -- the Newswire and our Something Elses, Heartfelt Yoga and the Writer's Workshop. The project was something that we asked for, which makes it easier to bear than any migration that might have been needed, but was never desired. As anyone who's done a migration or a Y2K project will concur, that last 5 percent of something large takes four times as much energy. You're worn down after weeks, or months, or even years. 

Our salvation -- and perhaps yours and one for the VMS faithful -- is to act in phases.

So with a colossal budget at our start, we divided up the dreams. Like perhaps a lift-and-shift, and then a revitalization, and finally a re-engineering, we had Phases 1, 2 and 3. Master Suite, Kitchen, and All Else, they became known as, concurrent with a Phase independent of all, pool and landscape. Connecting all the interior parts was the flooring. Yes, the floor that started it all.

The VMS community, like yours that precedes it, will probably look out over the next 7 years and divide the time similarly. The period to stock up with the latest hardware. That's a time to start the analysis and inventory of what's running their companies, toting up every VMS system that's far less obvious than a weather forecasting website. Then the necessary effort of replacement, pushing their Itanium and PA-RISC servers into archival and emulated modes, respectively.

For some in the 3000 community, who are now homesteading as their best business choice, there will come a day when the pail of water hits their wood floors. They have the advantage of expertise from migration services companies, better tools than a decade ago, plus the sympathies and cautions of everyone who's already done it. It won't make the last 5 percent easy to accomplish. But knowing that others have survived a calculated calamity helps you sleep on the nights like this evening, when there are no doors hung on the jambs of our house, and the scent of oil paint is heavy in the air.

Within a day of posting the letter, the VMS community was trying to organize an effort to get the operating system source code from HP, re-licensed as open source. Perhaps they didn't take much heed of the 7-year quest by OpenMPE to win the rights to MPE/iX. First there was a set of legal proposals, followed by the logical proposals that the OS couldn't be worth anything to an HP which was casting it aside. I'm talking here about both the 3000 community, as well as those wounded in the world of OpenVMS.

"Is there no one who can free VMS from HP?" asked one member on the comp.os.vms newsgroup. Another member replied with an update from the group devoted to Rdb, the Digital database as vital to VMS as IMAGE is to MPE. He wanted to deal with Digital people in place before a controversial CEO served up the first sale, to Compaq, before HP.

Up on the Rdb list, Keith Parris raised the possibility of HP open-sourcing VMS.  While I would prefer VMS to come from DEC before [former CEO Robert] Palmer, that is no longer an option.  If done correctly, an open-source VMS might be better than no VMS.  Perhaps HP should pay a peanuts-scale salary of, say, $150,000 so that someone can coordinate this full time. 

Unless a revolt has pulled down the walls of HP's IP legal group, such license freedom sought by customers won't be forthcoming. HP got badgered into releasing MPE/iX source to a select group of licensees, who cannot improve upon the 7.5 release but use their code to create workarounds and patches. However, the VMS people do have the advantage of a thriving emulator company for any Digital VMS implementations which run on older, non-Itanium servers. The tech issues have been long-solved for Charon for VMS, but there are licensing issues that the Digital user will need to manage for themselves.

Here's where the HP 3000 community is a decade ahead of the drop-kicked Digital group. Stromasys reports that licensing hasn't been an issue in getting Charon HPA/3000 up and running in the early days of sales. HP's provided the MPE/iX license, and that just leaves the third party software.

But product manager Paul Taffel said that "There have been no problems with vendors. We finally figured out who you have to call in IBM to get the Cognos license, for example." That would be Charlie Maloney, at 978-399-7341.

What the Digital faithful do not see in place yet is a license arrangement from HP for OpenVMS on every platform -- including some that may not yet exist, like an Itanium emulator. In these earliest days, they at least can point to the emulator company that's arranged for such a thing in the past. But there are doubts and uncertainty to go along with fears.

"Are these emulators a serious option?" said one customer on the newsgroup. "The emulators could be a serious option, but what of them, if HP clams up and refuses to license VMS on them?" 

The reply from another customer echoed right back to the earliest days of outrage over the 3000 transition. "This is why prying VMS from HP's clammy hands would be the first priority, and nothing else matters if that cannot be done."

Your community marshalled its forces in late 2001 and into 2002 to try to wrest the entire 3000 business from HP, at a price. Hewlett-Packard was not interested, but these are more interesting times. HP just won a lawsuit with Oracle, fighting over the future of Itanium. Oracle didn't want its software to run on Itanium anymore. Neither does HP want OpenVMS to run on Itanium. The wounded customers in the VMS world suggest that Oracle ought to sue to get back its judgement from the prior suit.

To demonstrate there's still value in working with Itanium, HP might be induced or coerced to smooth the OpenVMS path from HP product to community asset. Just like the 3000 odyssey of the previous decade, HP was assuring the VMS user in slide decks dated as recently as December.

Despite Oracle’s  announcement to discontinue all software development on the  Intel Itanium microprocessor, we remain committed to supporting  you and your IT environment. We will continue to support  OpenVMS on Tukwila-based and Poulson-based Integrity systems beyond the next decade.

As if that were not enough, another message came down from the man recently promoted to head HP's Labs. Martin Fink was formerly the head of the Business Critical Systems group where OpenVMS remains for sale until the end of 2015. In 2011, while HP battled Oracle in that suit, Fink found the moxie to make a rallying statement that will sound familiar to the 3000 customer. At least any who recall the mid-summer assurances of 2001 that preceded the November shutdown notice. 

Fink told OpenVMS customers

Let me reassure you. HP plans to continue the development and  innovation of Itanium-based Integrity NonStop and Integrity server platforms with our HP-UX and OpenVMS operating systems for more than 10 years.

At the bottom of each and every slide in these decks is the standard HP disclaimer that anything can change at any time. It's just this: until the song of departure is sung for you, it's hard to believe it HP would sing it to anybody as faithful as you've been.

Server upgrades for the OS will end one year later, if HP keeps to its plan. The strategy was announced in a letter that began

For over 35 years, the HP OpenVMS operating environment has served as a mission-critical platform upon which you have built your IT infrastructure. We deeply appreciate our long partnership and also the loyalty you have shown HP during this time.

In WW II these were called Dear John letters, received at the front from a back-home sweetheart who was stepping out of a relationship. HP couched its news in the cloak of a "Mission-critical Roadmap Update," (click for detail) and the vendor used phrases like "at least" in front of dates for ending server sales. But an 8.5 version of OpenVMS is not on HP's map, just like an MPE/iX 8.0 evaporated from Hewlett-Packard futures slides in 2001. The equivalent of OpenVMS 8.5 would be needed to support the Poulson class of Itanium chips, processors HP will use in its newest Integrity i4 boxes.

For the most loyal and patient OpenVMS customers -- who view migrating their proprietary systems as kindly as 3000 folk did -- HP will continue supporting Integrity i2 server hardware through the end of 2020. That year aligns with the one picked by HP's expert witness when calculating how long Itanium would be an HP revenue generator. HP learned something from the 3000 market while ending a business line. OpenVMS users will get more than six years of continued HP support -- longer than the five that HP first imagined when it curtailed its MPE business.

The move leaves just one HP-created general purpose OS running on Itanium boxes, HP-UX. (NonStop, from Tandem in an acquisition, is aimed at a much narrower purpose.) Like HP's Unix, OpenVMS servers come from the embattled Business Critical Systems group, where the HP 3000 lived out its remaining HP days. HP promised more remaining sales cycles for VMS servers than the 3000 servers got, but only by a few months. VMS on Integrity will serve out "at least" a remaining 30 months on HP price lists; the 3000 got 24 extra monthly reports.

The OpenVMS user has an advantage in its homesteading era which starts this week. The OS already has the benefit of an emulator company that's making a nice living in the DEC marketplace. Stromasys has 5,000 installations in 50 countries running its Charon products for VMS.

The road isn't fully cleared for any company to offer an emulator which will put Integrity onto Intel chips like Charon does with PA-RISC. A couple of redoubts remain. HP-UX and NonStop communities haven't gotten their letters yet. The Unix customers might slide sideways into Linux installations, but only with a level of pain and expense lower than the MPE community weathered.

The NonStop customer -- a group small enough to be unable to prop up Itanium design and improvements -- won't escape transition pain. This week would be the time to ask about HP's futures in NonStop, of course. One major difference from the 3000 wind-down: HP broke the news in the middle of its annual HP Discover show. Plenty of damage control would be on hand in Vegas this week.

HP's reaching out to support its less-independent OpenVMS customers with a "high level" of support as long as a company wants to pay Hewlett-Packard. The vendor is also equating transition with homestead support, the same kind of misunderstanding it held for 3000 customers.

We will continue to provide a high level of support to you through the lifetime of your OpenVMS environment. We have a full portfolio of servers, software, and solutions, including support for transitions to NonStop, HP-UX, Linux, and Windows environments.

None of those environments have much to offer that will make OpenVMS transitions less painful, but it's possible that Hewlett-Packard took some HP 3000 lessons to heart. That would mean that vendor-supplied transition tools will lead the way in the marketplace. But who might move from one HP proprietary OS to another? Just ask the companies which found replacement HP-UX apps for their MPE/iX applications over the last 11 years.

Hewlett-Packard doesn't consider these products proprietary, even though customer ecosystems have grown deep software roots into the operating systems' remarkable engineering. There's no significant profit that HP can make in selling servers for OpenVMS, HP-UX and NonStop. There's plenty of support profit, as there was for MPE/iX. So for at least five years after the last Integrity OpenVMS server is sold from HP, the vendor will collect support payments. This would align on the five-year mark HP that settled upon for the 3000. Sales ended in 2003, and HP's formal and full support -- including the MPE/iX lab -- shut down in December of 2008.

So even without letters to its last two Integrity environments, Hewlett-Packard demonstrates that the only future remaining for its most loyal Itanium customers will be 18 months of server sales, and 30 for upgrades.

HP called the update "a rolling (up to three-year) roadmap and is subject to change without notice." HP promised -- in the roadmap's fine print -- that what it's now calling Standard Support for OpenVMS won't be ended unless a customer is given 24 months notice.

A storm of indignity and dismay might arise in the OpenVMS community like the one we all watched here in ours. The revolt and rally might begin with the OpenVMS Boot Camp this fall, but that was never a meeting with vast exhibits and thousands of customers on hand.

VMS customers have already seen HP scuttle a business that was producing profits -- modest ones -- when Hewlett-Packard started its clock on the 3000, however. VMS managers might have made their plans accordingly. There's nothing like tolling the bell on hardware sales to spark migrations, as the 3000 community learned.

HP's making no promises about anything in the roadmap, either. "Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional representation or warranty or binding commitment upon HP. This is not a commitment to deliver any material, code or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions." That's language HP learned to use after its 3000-exit adventures more than a decade ago.

HP is making the technology behind smartphones -- one IT manager calls those toys -- shoulder the load of serving up massive websites, or perform financial analysis. Any application with a growing base of users and the need for horsepower that will scale, independent of power needs, might be a good fit for Moonshot. Or as HP calls the product on the server's website, the HP ProLiant Moonshot Server. Look a little harder at this server and you'll see an x86 architecture that's driven by Intel's Atom processors. Atom has a life inside mobile devices like Lenovo and Motorola Android phones.

Not exactly the top tier of phone makers. Apple makes its own A6x. Many other phone makers use ARM chips. In a way, the Atom processor in the Moonshot is a repurposing of the CPU. Atom was built to burn less than 10 watts of power at a peak. HP says the Moonshot chews up 89 percent less energy than the same compute power driven by Intel's Xeon family, or the Intel Itanium. You know, the traditional servers.

HP's not aiming Moonshot at small to medium businesses. When its website says "Shop for Moonshot" you don't go to a Build To Order menu like you can for other ProLiant servers. "Find a reseller," it says underneath. 

HP started building the Moonshot line in its labs four years ago. That was an era when R&D got no love at HP, but Moonshot stayed on target anyway. This was HP's entry into ultra-dense computing. For many customers relying on MPE, that's just a buzzword. But ultra-dense computers address a common 3000 need: reduced use of energy, in a small footprint, and cheaper than tradition. You have to go back to the 3000's Mighty Mouse Series 37, or the Series 918 PA-RISC server, to find something comparable in impact.

But that's at the high end of concerns. For someone who manages 3000s and thinks, as one IT manager wrote us,

If I could put a Moonshot in a workgroup of 8 or 10 people, and connect them to it with thin clients or  Windows terminals, and call it their workgroup server, then I could significantly shrink the datacenter.

Not really what the server is built for, sadly. We're talking thousands of people in a workgroup. Running something that wants to be Facebook or Twitter, but is not yet. Or serving video like YouTube. But the sweet promise of Moonshot is that being software-defined, its something that enterprises can optimize based on specific workload needs.

As it has for a long time, HP is showing off its large-scale system offerings to medium-scale customers. Because everybody wants to be bigger. One way to do that is to use something smaller, like an ARM processor or even Intel's Atom, the latter being IA-32 and x86-64 compatible. The processors from those toys are gathering in racks of 1,000 to make high horsepower computing -- perhaps on the horizon for a migrator -- cost less and draw less power and footprint.

To nobody's surprise, the chatter judged HP harshly on its invention score since dropping the 3000 as well as those MPE experts. But HP's Jim Hawkins, one of the select employees still holding MPE skills in his toolbelt, came to his employer's defense. If you'd like to see HP's most recent inventions, he said, going to next week's HP Discover conference would be a good start.

Few 3000 migrators are going to Discover, however. HP recognizes that the majority of its customers can't swing a trip to Vegas and an $1,800 entry fee. So Hewlett-Packard, a company which for a time had the word "invent" bolted onto its logo, will put selected Discover talks on the Web starting June 11. Whether you'll consider those presentations inventive depends on a customer's definition.

"My understanding is that CNBC will be broadcasting live from the [Discover] floor, Hawkins offered up on 3000-L. "If you want to learn what HP is really up to, there's a good place." The engineer whose expertise lies in MPE's IO added that he'd been to a "poster fair" at Hewlett-Packard recently, a gathering of IT inventors who presented their HP Labs concepts for things like network innovation.

If only the customers who've been in IT for decades were an easier crowd to convince. They remember an HP that prized inventing which flowed from the Spirit of the Garage. Plenty of things look like iterations of concepts, rather than inventions. Even Apple and Android-ians are facing that comparison next week. To seek out garage inventing you need to go farther online than vendor websites and conferences, whether Apple's or HP's.

"Apple is 'winning' because they're getting what they want in the (former) HP Way," said 3000 consultant Glenn Cole in the discussion. "They make a contribution, with millions of people able to take advantage of the attention to detail that Apple puts into their (still imperfect) products, and they get the cash to be able to invest in pushing the industry forward -- and also be everyone's personal computing design lab."

Computing design used to be paramount at that Hewlett-Packard of the HP Way. Everyone acknowledges that generation of HP is gone. But Hawkins mentioned inventions that won't be a part of Discover. These came from the HP Labs' poster fair. Whether HP's got the spark to market what follows is an answer to discover.

There were some really cool things like a no-glasses 3D display, and a method to determine co-location of devices without GPS or WiFi location information or any communication between the two devices. They use audio from device microphones to establish a pattern of -- background silence -- which is apparently better than the background noise [think two people listening to the same radio station in different locations]. That pattern information would be shared on a server and help you meet-up with people close by.

At the same time there were lots of other things which looked vaguely familiar to someone who's been in commercial computing for a while. There were ways to handle the change in the amount of data (tera-, exa-, pentabyte data sets), to structure unstructured data, to reduce the impact of the mismatch between CPU-to-memory-to-secondary storage.

As this HP-MPE engineer, still working at Hewlett-Packard, went on to examine the prospects of things like a system with memristor memory which could be permanent and as fast as your CPU, 3000 veterans grew quieter. One former reseller even expressed hope HP could return to its invention roots.

"I hope that HP can get back to blazing new trails to the future," said John Lee. The moving-off-MPE customer will likely hear a lot about HP Moonshot servers at Discover, as well as the newest, award-wining Software Defined Network products. "A conversation with HP chief technology officers." But Moonshot looks like a slimmed-down blade server to discerning eyes in the 3000 community

"It was difficult to tell what was innovative, unique or patentable about Moonshot," Lee said in reply to Hawkins' offering of Moonshot and SDN. "I'm not being critical, I'm giving a layman's opinion. HP looks the same as everyone else. Same with the SDN solution. I get product literature from IBM and they make the same claims."

Apple's invention looks just iterative to those who have no more affection for that vendor than the 3000 base does for HP. The Android-driven Samsung has the same problem with its clever Galaxy 4 phones. Waving at a screen to move items looks sexy, but might have its greatest value in a commercial. Skeptics don't like identifying things as inventive anymore.

If you're wondering what invention looks like in 2013, you'd be well served to go elsewhere online. You can find it at sites that serve up news coming from garages. Sites like hackaday.com or armageddon.com show off more than poster presentations. Inventions like an atmospheric water generator that extracts water from humid ambient air, or the Xprotolab portable oscilloscope, logic analyzer, and function generator. Or the biohacking work of Steve Mann, "a professor of electrical and computer engineering who has dedicated his career to inventing, implementing, and researching cyborg technologies, in particular, wearable computing technologies. Mann has been critical to advancing biohacking through his self-implementation of his inventions."

Much this technology got built in a garage, even the likes of the Rostock delta 3D robot printer. The passionate, rogue inventor might feel little comfort working in a corporation. But HP rose up out of a garage. Its first product was an oscilloscope innovation. There is hope for invention from a company so sophisticated that it hosts its own IT conference every June. Tim O'Neil, another 3000 manager, considers Discover the rebirth of the Interex conference. He sees hope in HP's pursuit of eyeballs for its latest products, though.

"After selling the HP chip design team to Intel, they are now going to lead the way towards flash storage and universal memory?" O'Neill said. "Nevertheless, it is encouraging that they actually want customers to attend."

When you look at the now-shipping Stromasys Charon product line, it's easy to see the product will run as fast as nearly all of the A-Class and N-Class servers. But HP sold three models of N-Class that are still out of the reach of today's virtualization engine speed. Those models represent the threshold Charon must still break to operate as fast as the fastest, hamstrung HP iron.

Hamstrung is a word from horses and people meaning to cripple. It's an acknowledged practice that the 3000's CPUs were down-clocked by MPE/iX. In some cases, like the lowest-end A-Class, the operating system dialed back the processor by 75 percent. A 440MHz CPU was forced to run at a genuine 110 in the entry-level A-Class. This is one reason why a fully-revamped, 1-processor A-Class HP 3000, with a faster bus, still only ran 70 percent faster than a Series 918.  Even at the dawn of a new generation of 3000s, HP was keeping the servers in check.

If a company is considering an emulation scenario on the way to a migration, these limits might not matter. At one Dallas-area e-commerce company, consultant Doug Smith reports the 3000 was moving to archive-system status. A migration was in the wings. But for other companies, hoping to match those three biggest-sized 3000s, June's Charon product line will leave them short of a match.

Migrators might not make up much of the Charon customer base. If they've concluded that a midrange 3000 will do the interim job, however, even companies leaving the platform will have enough horsepower. One of the reasons for this involves adding extra CPUs for the unreleased Charon versions. Unlike HP, Stromasys will support a 6-way or 8-way N-Class.

When it was still a product for sale from the vendor, this kind of top-end N-Class would cost more than $100,000. At that, it was a complex hardware-based server subject to the indignities of iron: CPU boards, specialized disks, proprietary memory -- all might fail in the way physical components do. But you could get very fast, with enough memory in an N-Class 500MHz or 750MHz server.

AICS Research, which sold QueryCalc to hundreds of 3000 sites for more than 25 years, still hosts the comprehensive 3000 Relative Performance Matrix on all MPE servers. The listing of benchmarked systems goes all the way back to the Series 30, as underpowered at the time as the early Series 930 was at the start of the First Generation of PA-RISC CPUs. HP wrapped up its benchmarking with a muddled picture. In 1998 it changed its processor comparison rating to the "HP Performance Unit." Since it was near the time of the e3000 renaming, this became known as the HP EPU.

"In effect," wrote the late, great Wirt Atmar in his notes to his matrix at AICS, "what they did was to begin to use a new set of test suites which they felt were more appropriate to the way that HP 3000s were being used."

The numbers aren't absolute measurements of anything other than the time the various systems take to process one of the several HP test suites, but they do allow you to compare with some accuracy the relative performances that you should expect when upgrading to higher performing system.

You must divide by 10 to get a set of EPUs that make sense in HP's final 3000 product lineup. The Series 918 became a 1.0 when HP recalculated its benchmarks. That means the 4-way 500 and both 750 MHz models at right are coming in at 49.9, 60.6 and 76.8 EPUs, respectively. The Stromasys lineup doesn't go that high today. As Atmar said, those are just numbers from a test suite. Your mileage will certainly vary.

Migration prospects these days are most likely to be smaller customers who didn't see a good business case for leaving the 3000 from 2003 to 2013. They need help from third parties to make their move, and useful advice might be to start the migration while using more reliable iron than HP's 3000 "kit," as the British would say. These people have got what they need from Stromasys today.

However, as the economy rises, some of the larger 3000 homesteaders may be replacing HP hardware that makes their boardroom directors nervous. Emulation can happen even at the same time the big homesteaders make a move -- like Amisys healthcare hosted sites are doing -- to something non-MPE.

The biggest homesteaders don't have a place to go yet to match their top-end performance on today's virtualization engines. However, using extra CPU cores will let Stromasys keep adding CPUs.

This More Cores strategy puts some of emulation's limits in the hands of Intel. That's a company that has not been shy about adding cores to its Xeon-x86 line of CPUs, the line that drives Charon. The level of innovation on that line is moving at many times the evolution speed of Intel's other enterprise chip, Itanium.

It's a gamble to guess at future performance needs, so selecting a hardware-based 3000 always involved predicting the lifespan of use -- the headroom for a site's application growth. Virtualization isn't much different in the forecasting, but moving up is a new experience. What makes virtualization attractive is the ease of upgrading to a faster model. HP might have called this a board swap back in the days that it sold hardware. This kind of swap was still on the order of $20,000 for the leap from HP. And that was after you turned back your old processor to HP, so it could be resold. Nobody's going to have to turn back a model of Charon software in order to turn up their performance.

GM Bill Driest suggests the sky's the limit for futures in hardware that's been curtailed by the vendor. At right, Stromasys CEO Ling Chang talks over the possibilities at the recent HP 3000 Social with Eric Sand of Sandsoft.

“People like Gartner are talking to us, and there’s been a fundamental sea change,” Driest said. “They’re saying this: isn’t it conceivable that the end state of all legacy hardware is some kind of emulation or virtualization?” 

Driest admitted that five years that belief was “so much of an early adopter message. There’s a fundamental pause as we ask, ‘On what platform do you believe we’ll run the last MPE production environment?’ Do you really think that it’s going to be on some refurb HP hardware?”

The company was introducing a strategy of “Rebuild, or Revitalize?” as the driver towards virtualization of the MPE-ready hardware. It exhorted the customers and resellers, along with support providers and consultants in the Computer History Museum's meeting room, to “Join the Revitalization Movement.”

This might seem to disrupt HP's plans to step away from platforms like the MPE engine of the 3000, or the VMS hosting on Alpha or VAX -- or perhaps the PA-RISC HP-UX servers, and dare we say it, the Itanium-based boxes. HP's own expert has said he figures Itanium production to be good only for another seven years. After that, the Integrity box might become legacy itself. Why, we wonder, has HP added the Charon products to its Worldwide Reseller Agreement?

Stromasys has never claimed to be creating a virtualization engine for Itanium processors. But given the size of the 3000 market versus the efforts to create Charon HPA/3000, I'd speculate that some of that HPA engineering could be re-used for another HP project.

According to Driest, analyst Andrew Butler of Gartner published a report this year that identifies Stromays as a disruptive technology in the server market specifically. “Butler said that ‘Functions commonly thought to be part of the underlying part of the OS are being distributed to the server, to the hypervisor, to storage.’ People are virtualizing everything. We’re almost re-inventing what it means to deploy an application,” Driest said.

The meeting presented a new and more extensive group of Stromasys executives to the 3000 community. CEO Ling Chang said the company “is proud to become a part of the 3000 ecosystem.” More than a decade after HP announced the 3000 would drop off Hewlett-Packard’s price list because of a declining ecosystem, that group has gained a member worthy of citation from Gartner.

When Gartner first started tracking the Stromasys offerings three years ago, they called it processor emulation, Driest said. “We fit in on this little bubble called Processor Emulation. We are fitting in at the peak of their curve called Inflated Expectations. It says there’s a promise for this technology.”

Hard questions came from one reseller who reported that he serves 135 companies using 3000s and had clients in the room from several California school districts. “Think about how you can help us help them,” he said. The reseller has been in the reseller business to service customers who manage K-12 schools using MPE/iX solutions.

The product lineup from Stromasys (click for detail) showed the top-end emulator being an N4040 virtualized system, running four processors at 250MHz — not the 750MHz rated for the 4-CPU HP hardware. The N4060 and N4080 models are forthcoming. The latter runs at an estimated 61 HP EPUs — four times faster than the A520 Charon model.

Stromasys also announced it’s just been named a Gartner Group Cool Server Vendor for 2013, the freshest part of the news, plans and futures the company unspooled in its first North American Training and Social event for 3000 customers and allies. The room of the Computer History Museum on May 10 was full for the day-long briefing on company strategy, as well as Paul Taffel's extensive demonstration of the HPA/3000 model of Charon in action.

Stromasys is one of only seven vendors who’ve made the server technology cool list, just published by Gartner. The company showed off a product lineup that includes a pair of implementations that are designed to out-perform some N-Class HP 3000 hardware. General Manager Bill Driest said he’s seen his company's software run on a cutting edge HP DL380 server with a 4.4Ghz processor installed, a pre-release from Intel.

But the power promises may extend beyond hopes of matching high-end N-Class performance. HP's taken on the software as a potential solution for its customers. Stromasys hopes the 3000's will share the view that hardware is only a waystation to a virtualized platform.

Work is underway in the Stromasys labs to utilize extra cores on the DL380's processor for such servers. With each 4-core set available in Intel chips, HPA/3000 could emulate another HP 3000 processor. The 32-core limits of today could yield an 8-CPU MPE/iX machine. This is a configuration HP could never ship or officially support while it built and sold its 3000 servers. The HP top-end was 4 processors for its 750-Mhz.

Driest made his debut in front of a HP 3000 crowd during a morning session that outlined where Stromays is heading from its current position as the only virtualization solution in the PA-RISC space. One new wrinkle was the announcement that Charon HPA/3000 has made the cut onto HP’s Worldwide Reseller Agreement. Stromasys already has its product that emulate VAX and Alpha systems on that list. 

A Worldwide Reseller Agreement gives HP the right to resell a product from a software supplier. Companies as large as security supplier McAfee have entered into such a deal. HP now has the mechanism to sell Charon HPA to customers who might want to remain as MPE/iX application users.

The Gartner announcement was a sneak peek at what Driest was describing as a way to earn its solution onto the Hype Cycle of Virtualization. Processor emulation is in the Expectations part of the curve, but Stromasys hopes to be securing a spot in the Trigger, a rising wave of the lifecycle.

“People like Gartner are talking to us, and there’s been a fundamental sea change,” Driest said. “They’re saying this: isn’t it conceivable that the end state of all legacy hardware is some kind of emulation or virtualization?” 

Driest admitted that five years that was “so much of an early adopter message. There’s a fundamental pause as we ask, ‘On what platform do you believe we’ll run the last MPE production environment?’ Do you really think that it’s going to be on some refurb HP hardware?”

HP's email promises a chance for direct interaction with its CEO Meg Whitman:

Engage directly with Meg Whitman and top HP executives to see how HP innovations shape the IT industry and help IT leaders like you succeed. Talk one-to-one with HP industry leaders via the HP Meeting Center and Partner Meeting Center. Book a tailored discussion of  your choice.

Converged Cloud, Information Optimization, Mobility Security and Risk Management, plus Business and Technical sessions are HP's main tent poles at the show. Signing an NDA gets you "the chance for a sneak-peek at what's next from HP during our extremely informative confidential disclosure sessions."

In one public session, HP will tell us how a full one-eighth of its website operation is being run from its latest servers.

"In this in-depth technical session you will gain a understanding of how to deploy HP Moonshot System in a production environment," the catalog reports. 

Savvis, "a leader in managed computing and network infrastructure for IT applications, will share the latest results of their testing on the Moonshot System."

The meeting at the Venetian on the Vegas Strip will also include two hours of talks on the OpenVMS environment, the closest thing HP's got to a 3000-loyal customer base. Plus, there's a Special Interest Group meeting. Another 692 talks and demonstrations are on hand. HP's keen enough on OpenVMS to schedule one demonstration for three separate 90-minute demos.

Typing the word "Unix" into the session catalog's search engine yields one result; there are dozens more for HP-UX. But HP is launching into HP-UX saying that you can "Pave the path for your mission-critical future with HP-UX and Integrity server innovation."

It's an ongoing battle trying to get ahead -and stay ahead- in business. Continuous innovation to your mission-critical IT infrastructure is vital to beat your competition. In this session you will learn about the newest ways to make your UNIX environment excel. We will cover the latest developments in Integrity systems, including increased flexibility and virtualization, along with new Serviceguard high availability features. Accelerate your critical IT to achieve better business results when you need continuous business.

As if that were not enough, there's HP's "Tectonic Shifts, where the future of convergence is taking us,” and where Martin Fink — the former head of the embattled Business Critical Systems group, and now HP CTO and Director of HP Labs, “will outline HP Labs' research in flash storage and universal memory, with an eye on where future technology might take us.”

$1,795 will take you to Discover this year.