After some delays, Hewlett-Packard is now ready to begin shipping the Posix-compliant version of its proprietary MPE operating system, MPE/ix, on its HP 3000 line of commercial systems. Developers kits began shipping last November (UX No 362) when Hewlett-Packard promised to have the end-user version ready by June. Early copies are now ready to go out the door, although unlimited shipments must wait until November. MPE/ix is Posix 1003.1 and 1003.2 compliant, the Unix shell interface coming compliments of Mortice Kern Systems Inc, Waterloo, Ontario (UX No 368). MPE/ix sits alongside of MPE, meaning that a mixture of MPE/ix, Posix and original MPE applications can be run on the same machine, exchanging data from the same or different databases. The company claims that converting applications from its HP-UX Unix line is much easier now that MPE/ix is in place – hence the surprising number of software houses that Hewlett-Packard pursuaded to work on both Unix and MPE/ix versions in its recent drive for high-end commercial software. It claims 100 packages from the mainframe world have been converted or are on their way, including the likes of Software AG and SAP AG. Sales of MPE/ix are likely to be made primarily into Hewlett-Packard’s existing installed base, reducing the pressure for those users to change architectures. But Hewlett-Packard also hopes for sales from heavy transaction processing users, taking advantage of MPE’s 20% to 30% perfomance advantage when running commercial TP applications, and from mainframe downsizers more comfortable with MPE’s mature systems management infrastructure when compared with Unix. Future Posix extensions to MPE will include security and transaction processing interfaces. Aside from Posix, MPE now supports all the main interoperability communications standards – Open Systems Interconnection, TCP/IP, SNA – something Hewlett-Packard regards as more essential to an open system than applications portability. It has plans for others, such as AppleTalk, in the near future. Meanwhile the latest version of MPE, release 4.0 is due to be available at the end of the month.
