Trying to steal some of the shine away from Sun Microsystems Inc’s Solaris x86 OEM campaign, Hewlett-Packard Co has signed Japanese giants NEC Corp and Hitachi Ltd to use its 64-bit HP-UX on their future Intel Merced servers. It’s hardly a knock-em-down deal as both are already HP PA-RISC OEMs and HP-UX partners and HP’s Unix for IA-64 is a big-endian affair which will run only on big-endian systems like the ones HP is building. Under an agreement signed in October last year (CI No 3,276), NEC and Hitachi had already begun contributing features of their respective mainframe operating systems to HP and co-developing new versions of HP-UX. At that time they said first components of the joint work would feature in HP-UX by the end of 1998. Hitachi’s relationship with HP goes back to 1989 when it worked with HP on development of PA-RISC chips and high-end server systems. It’s also an OEM of the HP product line. NEC came to the party later, in February 1995, when it signed an agreement with HP in the area of large-scale system servers. NEC’s NX7000 server line is based on HP technology but it also sells MIPS-based systems and was at one time co-developing a version of HP-UX’s 3DA architecture for MIPS. Hitachi’s offers HI-OSF/1 Unix on its mainframes. We wonder whether HP will be able to keep all of its PA-RISC partners on board or whether any will slip away to other solutions.
