Hewlett-Packard and its Japanese partners NEC Corp and Hitachi Ltd announced last week in Tokyo that they would be working together on new functionality for Hewlett Packard’s HP-UX Unix in the next generation 3DA Unix program announced last year (CI No 2,855). Up to now, NEC and Hitachi have been working separately with HP. According to an NEC spokesman, NEC and Hitachi both had similar aims, to add mainframe-like functions of robustness, modularity and scalability to HP-UX, making it more suitable for mission-critical applications, and it made sense for the three companies to combine their efforts. Discussions began in August and the agreement to combine efforts finalized this week. Initially the three companies will work on the exception- infrastructure and recovery aspects within 3DA. The HP-UX kernel will be extended to provide mainframe-type fault recovery; appropriate self-healing action will be taken when an exception occurs. HP-UX will intercept system-level faults and attempt to recover from the failure or blockade the failing resource. With this capability, HP-UX is expected to expand further in mission- critical markets such as financial systems and airline reservation systems. The first components of the joint work are expected in HP-UX by the end of 1998. Hitachi has had a relationship with HP extending back to 1989, centered around joint development of HP-PA-RISC chips and high-end server systems, as well as being an OEM vendor of the HP product line. NEC came to the party later, in February 1995. Hitach is also an OEM customer of HP’s large system servers. NEC’s NX7000 server line is also based on HP technology.
