Hewlett-Packard’s phase-out of its e3000 server won’t be a major problem for the Medical Assurance Society, says IT general manager Brett Palmer.
HP’s undertaking to keep servicing e3000s for five years means the society — one of the few organisations in New Zealand still using the e3000 — will have plenty of time to adjust, he says. “We’ll have to get another platform and that represents an expense, but five years is plenty of time to plan for it. It’s way outside the machine replacement cycle.”
Palmer, who only recently took up his position at the society and hadn’t worked with the e3000 before, says MPE/IX, the proprietary HP operating system it runs on, is “old and could do with additional functionality, but performs very nicely — it’s very reliable”.
HP will stop selling the e3000 on November 1, 2003 and continue to service it until January 1, 2007. It announced the phase-out on November 16.
In a statement, HP said “the rapid evolution of technology away from proprietary platforms and customer and partner decisions to move to other HP platforms led to the transition plan”.
The company is offering e3000 users financial and technical assistance for the switch to HP servers running HP-UX, Windows and Linux and customers with “newer” e3000s will be able to convert to servers running HP-UX “at no cost”.