Future of HP-UX in the current market trend

[Marcus France]

I have read varying reports of whether HP-UX 11i v4 will be supported on PA-RISC servers.

Does anybody know?

[Dennis Handly]

>Marcus: I have read varying reports of whether HP-UX 11i v4 will be supported on PA-RISC servers

The latest roadmap is here:
http://h21007.www2.hp.com/portal/site/dspp/menuitem.863c3e4cbcdc3f3515b49c108973a801?ciid=2108efed55f02110efed55f02110275d6e10RCRD

[Marcus France]

Thanks Dennis, but useful as that roadmap is, it does not confirm whether RA-RISC will support v4.

I've read various press articles where representatives from HP will not confirm if 11i v4 will run on PA-RISC.

[Michael Steele_2]

Hi

I have actively worked as a UNIX consultant since 1990, most of that time being spent in HP-UX.

Through out this time I have lived via the telephone and email systems from recruiters who respond to me resume posted on the internet. Usually www.dice.com since DICE has been around the longest and specializes in placing techies.

Through the COMPAQ merger in 2001 I received 15 phone calls and emails a day for viable openings. This has been a constant rate through much of my career, until 2009.

During 2009 I got more solaris and linux calls and emails in a ration of approx. 15 to one over hp-ux.

I believe a lot of HP clients tried their best to stay with HP and migrate into Itanium, but are leaving in hordes because they don't believe in large scale Itanium.

My father use to say, "... the first thing to go is maintenance...", and I also see this in the HP corporate world. HP Support is a shadow of what it was before the Compaq merger and for good reason, you can't let tens of thousands of knowledgable people go and expect to replace them with English Second Language Speaking People with no technical background. An experiment that HP has tried now for several years and is not getting better. When you call Costa Rica, the level of knowledge has not changed since it started several years ago, it is still very, very bad.

HP's one niche is in large scale computer environments. In low end linux and Windows dominate.

This leaves AIX and Solaris too take up the slack that HP is giving away in the high end, and this is where I fully expect the market to go in the next ten years, leaving HP to go the way that DEC and NCR and SCO and ATT and Novel and others before them have gone. Into history.

[Taifur]

Hi,

HP-UX (Hewlett Packard UniX) is Hewlett-Packard's proprietary implementation of the UNIX operating system, based on System V (initially System III). It runs on the HP 9000 PA-RISC-based range of processors and HP Integrity Intel's Itanium-based systems, and was also available for later Apollo/Domain systems. Earlier versions also ran on the HP 9000 Series 200, 300, and 400 computer systems based on the Motorola 68000 series of processors, as well as the HP 9000 Series 500 computers based on HP's proprietary FOCUS processor architecture.

In future HP-UX would be ahead more and more.

Cheers,
Taifur

[SoorajCleris]

I think Taifun didnt read any of the above posts!!!! :)

[SoorajCleris]

I am sorry its Taifur*

[Wim Rombauts]

It would surprise met if HP-UX 11i v4 still suports PA-RISC.
PA-RISC sales have stopped at the end of 2009 (or was that 2008 already), so according to HP's promise, they will provide hardware support and an OS on them for 10 years, being 2018 or 2019.

Itanium processor technology and possibilities are starting to differ too much from the old PA-RISC technology, so it will be increasingly difficult to provide one single OS that uses the latest features of Itanium processors, and still also run efficiently on PA-RISC.

HP-UX 11i v3 is supported until at least 2017, so it sounds reasonable to me that they will extend support vor 11i v3 on PA-RISC for 2 years, and focus 11i v4 on Itanium.

[Bob E Campbell]

As an HP employee I won't comment on futures, but have enjoyed reading your comments.

I will say that if I did not see a future with HP-UX, I would not be here ;-)

[Wim Rombauts]

Well another note about the future of HP-UX.

We currently use HP-UX for our mission critical applications and I have recently enjoyed how I could upgrade our production cluster from HP-UX 11i v2 with SG 11.17 to HP-UX 11i v3 with SG 11.19 without any effective downtime.
First a rolling upgrade from SG.
Then a rolling OS upgrade.

Maybe (or should I say probably ?) because we have much more experience in such procedures with HP-UX compared to Linux, but also recently we had to upgrade (that's another difference, we were forced to upgrade, not choose to upgrade as with HP-UX) our recently build RedHat Linux cluster from 5.3 to 5.4, and we had to bring it down completely for about half an hour before we could safely restart our virtual machines on it.

We still have a lot to learn about mission critical RedHat Linux clusters, but until we can do full rolling upgrades there, I really think there is a sure future for HP-UX.

One disadvantage for which I really hope HP will change it's policy is the maintenance cost compared to Linux. I don't care about the license price for HP-UX, that's a one-time cost, but maintenance can be over 4 times higher and it is very hard to explain that to someone who decides about money and budgets. If only HP would request maintenances fees per socket instead of per core, that would bring a big financial advantage to HP-UX, certainly with the upcoming Itanium 9300.