By William Fellows

Hewlett-Packard Co is moving its venerable MPE/ix series of proprietary servers into the internet age. This week it is adding new mid-range models, the HP 3000 989KS/x50s, and fitting them with a supported Apache web server. It didn’t say how much of the company’s other internet and e-commerce technologies would be brought to MPE/ix.

The new servers, which are the one-to-six way HP-UX Unix K-Class 580 models fitted with MPE/ix, offer 25% better performance than the existing 989KS models as they run the 240MHz version of the PA-8200 instead of the 200MHz part. They also offer 15% better performance than the high-end 997/800 servers, at least until HP offers MPE/ix versions of the 12-way T600 Unix servers. It makes sense. The mid-range units are the biggest sellers; the K-Class have been the Unix server groups bread and butter too. HP is also offering a driver for Java Database Connectivity and LDAP directory support on MPE/ix.

HP claims it is making headway on its stated goal of eliminating price discrepancies between the HP 3000 systems and the lower priced HP-UNX Unix systems however the baseline MPE/ix uniprocessor model 150 is $103,000 versus the $75,000 HP charges for the HP-UX version. The six-way K898KS/650 is $218,00-up. The AutoRAID 12H disk array is now also available for use with the HP 3000 series while HP OpenView IT/Operations scripts and the HP secure web console are now bundled with the operating system too. HP says it plans to offer support for Fibre Channel storage in future.

HP, which is to port MPE/ix to IA-64 and extend the life of the HP 3000 family doesn’t have the operating system up on IA-64 simulators yet, but then HP 3000 in its IA-64 incarnation will lag its HP 9000 Unix cousins by some margin. HP’s new PA-8500- based N-Class servers, which are upgradeable to IA-64, won’t be fitted with MPE/ix and offered as 3000 series systems until the end of next year or beginning of 2001. There are estimated to be some 70,000 HP 3000 systems in the field and 45,000 service contracts. HP says the HP 3000 order rate is tracking at the pace it did last spring and after a miserable first quarter all round for HP’s server business.