Report on a Community in Chaos:
(continued from page 1)

Reliability and stability take a back seat to open systems

Asked about his return to the e3000 after three years working with other technologies, Lancaster said, “It’s not that it’s an old technology, as much as it is a proprietary technology. MPE is an amazing piece of work, and its reliability has been both its biggest draw and its biggest drawback.”

Lancaster listened to HP say that without their guiding hands after 2006, e3000 users would be in big trouble. “Seeing this really got me riled. There’s such a strong community of support available for the 3000 that I knew we could do something to counteract HP’s message of doom.” But, a contented community is a quiet community. Lancaster described the bond he’d always felt with others in the e3000 community. It was for years HP’s only commercial general-purpose business computer.

The rapid growth of HP-UX, Linux, and now Intel servers forced the e3000 into the shadows both inside and outside HP. “I think I saw it coming in the late 90’s,” says Lancaster. He spent three years negotiating with the old guard of the e3000 community to put together the very successful HP e3000 Solutions Symposium in early 2001. “As difficult as it was to persuade people that the symposium was a
good idea, HP’s announcement just months later shouldn’t have been a surprise.”

Coming back home… or “Homesteading”?

Many e3000 customers felt betrayed and let down by HP, especially on the heels of making a five-year commitment to the e3000. It was
during this initial time of confusion that the term “Homesteading” was used to describe those who choose to remain on the e3000. The
term “homesteading” today often refers to those who prefer to do for themselves what had been commonly provided by the government
or other large organizations. It is a term that depicts independence and self-sufficiency. (Story continued on page 4)

(Story continued on page 4)

                 
 
 
 

Creating A More Reliable System

Many users have already been experiencing diminished hardware support from HP. You can help yourself be less susceptible to hardware failures, and therefore less reliant on HP’s hardware support. In this, and future issues, we’ll show you how. This issue: Hot-Swappable Disk Drives.

The key to minimizing the impact from CE’s with minimal knowledge the e3000 is to reduce the complexity of swapping out
bad disk drives. The easiest way to do this is to replace your non-hot swappable disk drives with hot swappable disk drives in a RAID environment. RAID is short for “Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks”. These drives are typically “hot swappable”, which means you can swap out a bad disk on the fly, easily and without a lot of background in computer hardware. With the proliferation of inexpensive hot swappable RAID Arrays now available in the used market place, this is a very cost-effective solution.

The major benefits to you are:

 

• You can swap out the bad drive yourself
• No need to place a service call and risk an inexperienced CE
• Swapping is immediate, limiting your down time
• You service contract will provide a new disk drive


Remarketed disk arrays are readily available at a good price. Two we recommend are the A3549A Model 20 SP620 Deskside Array and A3550A Model 20 SP620 Rackmount Array. Known also as the “Nike” arrays, they are readily available and support both RAID 1 (mirroring) and RAID 5 (data striping).

Another excellent array is the SureStore Model E Disk Array 12H, also known as the Model 12H Autoraid Array. It is supported on MPE as both a boot device and a user volume.

(The full article, available on our web site, explains how to purchase, install and configure these two models of RAID arrays
– www.resource3000.com)

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