The updated HP-UX, which is called HP-UX 11i v2, offers almost equal functionality, says HP, to the long-established version of HP-UX for its PA-RISC servers, HP-UX 11i v1.
HP’s naming schemes for HP-UX are a little confusing. Early implementations of HP-UX 11i, called v1.2, v1.5, and v1.6, have been shipping on the Merced and McKinley implementations of the Itanium processors; the HP-UX 11i implementation for the PA-RISC processors that are sold in the company’s HP 9000 and Superdome servers is called HP-UX 11i v1.
The HP-UX 11i v2 operating system is the one that will run on the forthcoming Superdome server using Intel’s 1.5 GHz Madison Itanium 2 processors, which are due in the middle of the year. This HP-UX version will also run on subsequent and smaller Itanium-based servers that are based on variants of the Pinnacles chipset that is at the heart of the Superdome machines. These baby Itanium Superdomes are expected this year and early next year. While HP is rolling out the new version of HP-UX for Itanium today, the product will not be available until the end of July. This suggests that we should be expecting Madison at the end of July, not in June. This is not, as you can see from looking at your calendar, mid-2003 in the strictest sense. But then again, this is the computer business.
Mike Wardley, worldwide marketing manager for HP-UX, says that both the PA-RISC and Itanium versions of the HP-UX operating system support the same compiler environment toolset, which allows applications written for one processor (PA-RISC or Itanium) to be compiled to run on a machine with the other type (Itanium or PA-RISC). The HP-UX environment on the Itanium platform also has the ability to run compiled HP-UX applications in an emulation environment that it called the Aries converters, but Wardley says very few customers do this and HP doesn’t expect many to do this.
What HP has not done yet is launch a single version of HP-UX that will span both PA-RISC and/or Itanium processors. That, says Wardley, is slated for about 18 months from now. HP-UX v3, as that future consolidated release will be called, will merge the two streams of operating systems, something that will be possible mainly because the guts for the Itanium 2 processors will have stopped changing as radically as they did moving from Merced to McKinley to Madison Itaniums. Having a single HP-UX operating system that spans both processors is an important part of protecting the $20bn HP-UX ecosystem, which includes HP and its partners. HP has over 2 million active HP-UX licenses, with over 70,000 ServiceGuard and 65,000 workload management server licenses. HP has over 2,000 software engineers working on HP-UX, and computer makers NEC Corp, Hitachi Ltd, and NCR Corp are all OEM partners for HP-UX.
The new HP-UX for Itanium has a much smaller install time – about two hours, down from about two days according to Wardley, and can be installed in three pre-configured stacks spanning different scenarios. There are wizards that walk administrators through setting up a foundation HP-UX configuration for Web services, an enterprise operating environment with a journalled file system, and a high availability clustering setup for mission-critical applications based on ServiceGuard. The prior HP-UX for Itanium required numerous reboots as different components were added. Wardley says 300 independent software vendors have committed to HP-UX on Itanium, and says this represents a critical mass. We now have a viable Itanium platform, a robust and complete ecosystem. While this is certainly true in the HPC arena (HP admits it), it will take until the end of the year to reach the 1,000 ISV target the company is shooting for across HP-UX, Windows, and Linux platforms. HP-UX was not quite up to par on Itanium for the past two years, but it is well ahead of Linux and Windows when it comes to ISV support. HP will make sure its HP-UX bases are covered, but has little control over what Windows and Linux ISVs do.
The new HP-UX for Itanium includes HP ServiceGuard high availability cluster and workload management features, which were missing from prior releases. It also includes support for the IPv6 network protocol (which can be used concurrently with IPv4), and support for the HP-UX Bastille v2 security lockdown tool. The JFS 3.5 journalled file system has been enhanced with this Itanium release of HP-UX, and HP has made improvements for HP-UX running Oracle9i Real Applications Cluster environment.
HP-UX 11i v2 for Itanium platforms is available on Merced, McKinley, and Madison Itanium machines for $2,300 per processor. Companies with existing HP-UX 10.20 and 11i v1 licenses on PA-RISC gear that have support contracts can upgrade to the improved Itanium version for free, as can existing customers on Itanium platforms.
Source: Computerwire
