Future of HP-UX in the current market trend

[Willy Perez]

I have been working with HP-UX for about 15 years and it is a great OS compared with Linux.
I would like your opinion about the future of HP-UX. It is clear that the market is moving towards Linux and vmware. I would like to know how HP-UX will compete with these platform in the future, I know this is a very general statement. It is unfortunate that HP never ported HP-UX to x86 platforms, but that is another story for another time.

[Andrew Rutter · Accepted solution]

hi,

hpux is very good, and still widely used as im sure you are aware. yes linux and vmware are also very good in there place.

my feel is hpux will be around for still a good few years yet, but how far it will develop only hp can answer truly. it also greatly depends upon how much they are willing to invest on the newer hardware technologies too.

we can now run virtual machines on hpux servers too, and probably do much of what can be achieved on linux and vmware.

it was for me a sad day that hp stopped making and supporting workstation on hpux, but understandable in todays market place.

you may think it is unfortunate that hp never ported it to x86, but for me that is one reason i think its as good as it is, just more a shame they stopped the pa risc's

the latest version 11.31 is as good if not better, than any other os in my opinion for server environments, but means a more specialised sys admin, thats a good thing too in my opinion, but can make support more costly

maybe you should have a look here for more details on the newer versions of hpux

http://h20338.www2.hp.com/enterprise/w1/en/os/hpux11i-v3-overview.html

Andy

[Olivier Masse]

I think that HP-UX still has a few good years in front of it. There are still advantages of running HP-UX in high-end enterprise environments, but it is very dependent on your situation. The licensing cost is very high, and that limits a lot its reach to low-end deployements. So it will remain a niche operating system targeted to enterprise customers.

Brian Cox himself said in December that long-term projects should seriously consider Linux so that pretty much says what HP's long term plan are for HP-UX: keep HP-UX for current high-enterprise deployments, and embrace Linux for future, prospective customers.

Porting HP-UX to x86, and engineering a souped-up Proliant platform to replace the Integrity would indeed be interesting but many customers who have just been through a transition from PA-RISC to IA-64 wouldn't like that. I think this would be a marketing suicide to move to x86-64 in the short term.

Sticking with HP-UX for now makes a lot of sense to me in my situation since we've recently migrated to it in 2007 from another OS. And no matter what it costs, it just plain works. Many things can now be done online, and I didn't have to go explain unplanned downtime to upper management for the simple reason that there hasn't been any.

Olivier.

[Benoy Daniel]

HP-UX 11iv4 development is already going on and V5 is in planning phase. And with Blade architecture HP-UX is going to grow further.

[Dennis Handly]

HP-UX 11.31 is continuing to provide new features with its various updates, including one for this March.
http://www.hp.com/go/hpux11i

[Kapil Jha]

see the roadmap for HPUX
http://h20338.www2.hp.com/hpux11i/downloads/HPUX%20Public%20Roadmap.pdf

They have long Road map, but still I think there are industries which may not go for Linux and Vmware they would love to stick with UNIX.
As its for sure more reliable.

I suppose small data centers and small applications may get migrated to Linux (my customers are moving to Linux for all small applications).

BR,
Kapil+

[DeafFrog]

SUN was bought by Oracle , since then Oracle has alredy found customers for their new "consolidated" products ,brains at HP must be thinking various routes (SOA @ ITRC).No doubt that vmware and Linux are here to stay....though they will have to strive more to make way to production datacenter(ohh...they already are).....just a li'l thought of mine.

[Kapil Jha]

Well SUN seems to have bright future, i suppose we would come to know about the trend in next 10-12 months.
As oracle have monopoly now they are good to give end-to-end solution, they have DB,UNIX,JAVA and other applications
wooooo whats Larry upto :)

Oracle has already launched the fastest ORACLE server with SUN Hardware which used to be with HP (although its still continued...for how many day??)

BR,
Kapil+

[Basheer_2]

Salaams to all.

Here in Middle east especially in Saudi Arabia, HP-UX is growing. I have seen many new HP-UX superdome installations. The banking, oil, and healcare sectors are adopting to HP products.

[Wim Rombauts]

Well, my experience ...

15 years ago, I was already working with HP-UX. Around that time, Microsoft microsoft had released it's Windows NT Server platform.
The talk in our company was then that this Windows NT Server platform was finally THE solution. UNIX was going to disappear, everything would become windows, because it was so easy to use and configure and so cheap compared to UNIX.

Look at where we are today : We (= our company) more hate Microsoft tha love it. It is still widely used (The AD domain, Exchange, ... ) but our UNIX platform hasd never been so big and currently is our mission critical platform, despite the fact that we would stop with this platform and no longer spend money on it 15 years ago.

Now there is Linux. And again people say this is the platform of the future, that it will replace UNIX and seriously compete with windows.
As I see evolvments in Linux, it sometimes goes with big steps, where rolling upgrades and backward compatibility is not allways seen as so important. For new implementations (what currently is over 90% if Linux) and non-critical applications, this is not an issue, but I wonder what will happen when big businesses start upgrading there Linux systems. Maybe by then Linux has evolved enough to support rolloing, compatible upgrades without too much downtime. Maybe it does not, and maybe some companies will return to UNIX because Linux doesn't seem to be the solution for everything as they tought it would be, just like Windows Server 15 years ago.

But it's all a maybe.