be extended by two years for certain clients or geographic regions. In September 2007, HP once more extended its support for the systems, offering Mature Product Support without Sustaining Engineering (ending its creation of software patches). Some patches had been built and tested inside HP, but lacked customer base testing by the end of 2008. HP made these patches available after the end of 2010 (an Excel list of beta patches). By 2011, HP had extended a special provision to 3000 customers that granted them free access to patches, unlike the rest of HP enterprise line, which was forced in 2010 to adopt a "pay for patching" support program instead of free patches. Independent support A group of independent vendors has assumed systems and software support for existing customers who have left the ranks of HP's 3000 support business. Several have pledged to continue support for their own software until customers stop using the server. Others, offering comprehensive support, are citing 2016 and later as their end of support dates. A consultants directory is maintained by Robelle Software, and other independent consultants are available through a listing at the OpenMPE website. Open source software resources, including commodity tools, for the 3000's MPE/iX operating system are maintained in a website by Applied Technologies. The HP 3000 has enjoyed one of the longest lifetimes for any business computer system. These enterprise-grade computers have outlasted the highly regarded PDP-11 and VAX series, although OpenVMS operating system is still being offered on Alpha, IA-64, and x86-64 based systems. In January 2012, Stromasys announced the development of Charon/HPA-3000, which enables secure transfer of HP3000 systems to a state-of-the-art environment. Stromasys's solution virtualizes the hardware of an existing HP3000 system, and enables the MPE/iX operating system, third party applications, and user-developed software to run without any modification whatsoever, on industry-standard Intel servers. Their offering includes a two-user evaluation copy delivered in a VMWare package. Multiple independent vendors have purchased HP3000's Operating System Source Code, MPE/iX and are committed to supporting both hardware and software solutions for HP3000 systems. Beechglen Development, Inc. began hosting HP3000 systems in 2002. In 2012 Beechglen introduced HP3000 compatible custom fibre channel disc arrays using current technology SSD and SATA hard drives, effectively replacing SCSI tape and SCSI disc devices. As of January 2020, Beechglen is the only vendor that has developed and offers 2028 MPE CALENDAR intrinsic patches for the MPE/iX