Announce: new "DRD" product from HP

[Scot Bean]

FYI: A new HP-UX (free) product/utility was released this week by HP:

"Dynamic Root Disk (DRD) allows customers the ability to patch their HP-UX 11i systems online and quickly re-boot during off hours to affect the changes. DRD can also be used for HP-UX 11i system recovery as well. On its initial release, DRD will support LVM root volumes. A future update will provide support for VxVM root volumes."

Download for free from http://www.software.hp.com

Main documentation site:
http://docs.hp.com/en/DRD/index.html

Basically, one feature is live patching with deferred reboot. So you have some new alternatives for patching maintenance.

[Steven E. Protter]

Thanks Scot,

I know it will take time for sysadmins and customers to accept, but it sounds like an ice tool.

SEP

[Sameer_Nirmal]

DRD sounds good. I haven't read or explore more about it so far. But few things that comes to mind are

1. It would have been nice if it is also supported on HPUX 11.11
2. Does it has capability to clone the online OS image on a disk on other server?
3. It would be nice to have some tool/utility in place which would be quite useful in DRP environments where one can clone the PROD OS Image to a disk on failover server's spare disk and then just make the disk bootable and boot through it ( irrespective of h/w platform underneath).
This mechanism is already is place in Solaris.

Thanks for the let us know about the new utlity.

[Scot Bean]

Sameer, good comments, yes this is 11.23 only. In this first release, the clone disk is a local spare disk. Expect more flexibility here in future releases.