First, HP said its Global Workload Manager, which it previewed late last year for controlling HP-UX 11i v2 and Linux 2.6 partitions and their applications on Integrity machines, has begun shipping.
This cross-platform workload manager is an extension of the HP-UX workload manager, which has been embedded in that Unix environment for many years and keeps multiple applications from consuming too many resources. HP is making a trial version of the software available from its web site.
HP has also announced more rugged partitioning for HP-UX 11i called Secure Resource Partitions. The basics of this offering used to be sold as an add-on to HP-UX called Virtual Vault, which was sold primarily to financial services companies that needed to have absolute isolation between partitions.
Now HP is integrating the secure partitioning software into HP-UX itself. With Secure Resource Partitions, rules-based software that acts more or less like a firewall controls what processes can exit a partition or enter it from the outside. These new partitions will be available sometime in the second quarter of 2005, and will presumably be available as a patch to HP-UX 11i v2.
Finally, HP made some changes to its MC Serviceguard high-availability clustering environment. With the enhancements announced this week, metro-area clusters can be separated by 250 kilometers, up from 100 kilometers, and cross-continental clusters, which are used to offer high-availability and disaster-recovery for multinational corporations, can now share a backup failover server.
In the past, each high-availability setup in MC Serviceguard required that a production machine have its own target backup machine; with recent tweaks, one target machine can actively back up three production boxes simultaneously.
However, the target box can obviously only recover for one of those production boxes at a time. This 3:1 ratio will help larger HP-UX shops save money because they will not have to fully replicate their data centers.
