Advantages of HP-UX over AIX,Solaris and other Unix falvours

[YOGESH_15]

Hello All,

I want to know what are all the advantages of HP-UX over AIX / Sun-Solaris and other flavours of Unix.

Thanx in Advance

Regards,
Yogesh

[MarkSyder]

SAM - AIX has a similar product called SMIT, but having used both I much prefer SAM.

I've not used Sun/Solaris, so can't comment.

Unixware has no SAM/SMIT utility.

This forum is definitely an advantage of HP-UX - I use the forum as an on-line training session, learning from other people's questions and answers.

Mark Syder (like the drink but spelt different)

[Ranjith_5]

Hi Yogesh,

I have worked more on hp-ux and I started working on the other platform recently.

I. I feel that hpux is more user friendly.

II. Solaris is the most complex to learn I feel. Is very difficult also to learn as compared to hpux and aix.

III. hpux is plug n play..Devices getting configured and addded automatically in many cases. In unixware even to install a hard disk you should follow a complicated procedure.

This is from my limited knowledge..Other may comment better.

regards,
Syam

[Victor BERRIDGE]

Hi,
Unixware: No comment... (Our site has a UNISYS with unixware7 on it... not in use anymore...) Or lets say "Good for Novell/NT administrators - same philosophy"...

Solaris: Is the most "academic"... its for unix gurus in the way you are given a great toolbox and you are left with making your own workshop... even linux has better administration utilities (GUI...)...
AIX has a very powerfull system administration tool called smit (smitty) but things get really less obvious when you dont find in smitty what you are trying to achieve... from then you realize that aix is somehow a black box where its difficult to find information (many undocumented commands for IBM internals only), AIX specific: when ODM gets corrupted you are on a great challenge...
Try to tune AIX!
(Im interrested, yes truly...)
Having said all that, in favor of HP (all others are way behind...) It is easy to get to know quite well the system, with the help of this forum, and so to get a box performing almost at its best (yes even tuning the kernel...).

All the best
Victor

[Fred Ruffet]

Stability. It's the biggest advantage I see here. Nothing else to add about this. It's every server goal.

Other points is about the feeling I have with this OS. But you can say that practicing a lot with one OS makes you familiar with it.

I think that nowadays, choice is more between HP-UX and AIX.

As Mark said, this forum is really a good point. I remember recently, having problem in an evening work. Other guy working with me was smiling when he saw me post a new thread on a forum for a problem that had to be solved ASAP. He was really surprised when I had my solution within 10 minutes !

Regards,

Fred

[Zeev Schultz]

Actually every OS has its benefits and downsides.I remember working with SMIT and
it was pretty nice,also showed the commands
executed.The internal structure of AIX is a
bit complicated,you know unix guys out there
call it Ain't unIX.It has a sort of Windows
registry like ,C++ I think based internal structure called Object something.

Why didn't you compare Linux as well?

[MarkSyder]

Ain't unIX - I like that!

An ICL person I used to work with said it stood for Always Interesting eXcuses.

Joking aside, I do like AIX, but prefer HP-UX.

Mark

[Mobeen_1]

Yogesh,
I couldn't agree less with Fred here. I would think that now a days for people hoping onto Unix, its mostly between AIX and HP-UX. I have worked hands-on on some unix flavours and was leading teams that managed a few others...here is what i think some points that may be of interest to you

1. Hardware - I would rate HP-UX and AIX
at the top and SUN-SOLARIS
right at the bottom of my
list.
2. High Availability - AIX and HP-UX again
I would not bother to
have SUN-SOLARIS on my
list

3. Usage (Sys Mgmt) - AIX and then HP-UX

4. Performance - HP-UX and then AIX

Some general points

1. If my application run/supported on tru64
then that will be my first choice for
unix.

2. HP-UX systems generally take less time
as compared to IBM RS series/AIX shutting
down and starting back up. But then again
IBM servers tend to do a lot more diag
when starting up

3. I have had good experiences with Hot-Swaps
on HP and AIX and very bad experience on
Solaris

4. I am not sure but you probably would also
need to look at the cost benefit. If your
shop already has Alphas then Tru64 Unix.
Else need to look at HP-UX and AIX.
I can tell you the costs for running
Solaris is probably far less, it
defintely out scores HP and AIX, but
do take a look at the spare costs :)

It probably looks like i am suggesting AIX :), but hey we had all the 3 SUN, HP and AIX in our data center and i have seen the issues involved first hand.

Also take note that for training your people, it would be very easy on AIX and HP (SMIT and other tools are available), Solaris is going to be a nightmare, they technically have everything right from disk/volume mgmt utilities to system mgmt utilities but all of them are from their so called partners.....

It would be interesting, if you could post back some time later and let us know what you folks have choosen and why :)

regards
Mobeen

[Mobeen_1]

Yogesh,
Another point i would like to mention, if you are running SUN, there are chances that you would not be able to find out 7 out of 10 times why your server has crashed. I have seen this happen and have discussed this at length on various sun forums. I am not technically conversant on how their dumps work, but they are really not very helpful.

I have how ever heard from some colleagues that there has been a slight improvement in this arena from Solaris 8 onwards :)

rgds
Mobeen

[Cheryl Griffin]

I did like smitty because it told you the equivalent commandline but that feature also exists in kcweb now.

[Deoncia Grayson_1]

I've worked on hp, aix, solaris and sco... I'm still reliving the night mare of sco.
I believe solaris is a box you get and have to dress up with third party software to have it running the way you want, its not very cost effective, but its a stable box once you have finished adding software to it, but its only for the gurus if you're not putting any third party software on it but solaris 9 is allegedly much better then the others but i haven't worked on it yet, so can't comment.
Aix has a great admin tool called smitty and gives you command but if its not in smitty prepare to drown in the black abyss of AIX, but most financial institutions in my area are moving to that platform.

HP is my favorite so I won't comment on it but know that I am completely biased towards it and I haven't any major problems, if I did I can always hop on this forum, the other platforms can't compete when it comes to ITRC.

[Geoff Wild]

I have worked on just about every Unix flavour....

HP-UX is by far my favourite...though I also found Irix quite good as well.

Main advantage for HP-UX - support - both from HP and the community - both are second to none. I have seen quite a few posts on these forums asking AIX/Solaris questions - why? because community support for those OS's is limited.

My only knock against HP at the moment - is hardware direction - in particular CPU...They say that PARISC is in it's last incarnation - yet they also seem to be dropping Itanium...IE - you can't buy a HP Workstation for HP-UX on Itanium anymore, plus they ended their 10-year partnership to co-develop the Itanium chip for server computers, following disappointing sales of the product. So - what next - HP-UX on AMD? I don't know....

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=internetNews&storyID=7106921

Plus for AIX - hardware - Power5 seems to be blowing the doors off of everyone...

Solaris - my least favourite - only major Unix without a posix compliant root shell...I'd rather run on Linux then Solaris...

Some other links:

http://bhami.com/rosetta.html
http://www.unixguide.net/unixguide.pdf

Rgds...Geoff

[A. Clay Stephenson]

I suppose the strongest advantage that I can list for HP-UX and HP hardware is that I am now at 5.5+ years of zero unplanned downtime. The longest comparable value for any other flavor of UNIX (including Solaris, AIX, Tru64 UNIX, UnixWare, SCO, Linux) that I can claim is about 1.5 years.

My experience is that if you are good in essentially any UNIX flavor, you will be good in other UNIX flavors in short order. The converse is also true.

My also admittedly biased observation is the the worst UNIX is better than any flavor of Windows.

[Steven E. Protter]

Industrial strength hardware.

We have had no downtime in years that could not have been prevented by completion of Servicguard and alternate links configuration.

The OS comes out solid, is easy to patch and can typically be run for months between reboots.

I've worked with other flavors, and especially Linux. I like Linux and Solaris, but given my choice, I like HP-9000/HP-UX. I can sleep at night, and thats important with little ones bouncing about the house.

SEP

[Chris Vail]

This is a religious discussion, really. You'll find strong proponents of every hardware/software combination. They wouldn't exist at all if they weren't effective. I've used lots and lots of Unix variants over the years: HPux, AIX, Solaris, SunOs, BSD, FreeBSD, Linux (several variants), SCO (Pentium, 486, 386 and even 286), SVr4 (several variants), and TRS-Xenix, Venix, SCO-Xenix, Unixware, Tru64, and IRIX. I consider myself an "OS agnostic".

HPux is good. The hardware is fast and reliable. The OS support is good. Its also the most pricey. I make my living at HPux, so I'm a little prejudiced.

AIX is good. On a performance/dollar basis, its the most expensive of the lot. But it is hyper-stable. It takes more abuse than any other system out there. I love smit. SAM could learn a few lessons from smit.

Sun is good. On a "bang for the buck" basis, its probably the cheapest. It also tends to be the most arcane/obscure. It has the largest market share of any of the majors. Its technology is aging, however. IBM and HP continue to innovate, and Sun hasn't come out with anything really new in 3 years. Further, the internet really does run on Sun because of the Netscape/Iplanet connection. For any 'net centric application, Sun is first. Right now, Sun's biggest competition is its own used products (I know a guy who has an E10k for $4000, and can't sell it). So prices are really good.

Linux has some real advantages in upfront hardware costs. Oracle and some of the major application developers are porting and supporting Linux in a big way. IBM is supporting Linux in a way such that I wonder if AIX will even exist in 3 years.
All of the major vendors, including Sun now, have a Linux strategy. You should definitely include Linux as part of your long-term strategy as well.

Like others have said, the weakest Unix variant installation is still stronger than the strongest Microsoft installation. Whichever you choose, choose some form of Unix.

Chris

[Rick Garland]

Posting in this forum is sure to draw most favorably for HPUX as we are mostly HPUX bigots.

My experience would be HPUX is better. The SUN/SOLARIS I have fun with but the hardware is much more troublesome. AIX is sue to go away, IBM is coming out with their version of LINUX with AIX extensions. Straight LINUX is good and getting better but I do not feel is it quite ready for mission critical apps yet. It is close but I don't want to go there quite yet.

LINUX is good and getting better - probably has a better ROI associated with it.

Don't forget the service - I lothe IBM service calls. SUN is so/so, depends on the problem and where you are. HP service is the best I have seen for hardware and software.

Even though HP is costly, I believe you get your money's worth because of the reliability & stability that come with HW and SW plus the service is great.

[Geoff Wild]

Aha!

See this "AIX" post here today:

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=781433

Rgds...Geoff

[Biswajit Tripathy]

Fred Ruffet Wrote:
> As Mark said, this forum is really a good point.

Your love for this forum is indicated by the following
statement in your profile:

I have assigned points to 175 of 174
responses to my questions.

Just kidding :-)

- Biswajit

[Angus Crome]

I will always have a soft spot for IRIX as I learned a lot on that OS, however, the nature of the proprietary Graphics hardware caused it to be flaky.

I started out on SunOS and then Solaris, and liked it a lot, but from a newbie standpoint, it is really difficult to learn. Their hardware is not really up to snuff either, as I have seen more than my fair share of SUN issues during multiple 1 year periods. An exhorbitant rate of CPU and memory failures.

AIX is rock solid, but I have to disagree with some of the posters about its ease of use, and frankly I can't stand SMIT, at least up throug 5.2, "the last OS I worked on".

HP-UX is very easy to administrate and I very much miss it these days, "am stuck in Solaris land". I had systems running for years without a reboot, and never thought anything of it. As for SAM, it is a reasonable GUI or command line interface, but disk changes and kernel creations are awfully slow to complete. Costwise, I don't find the OS to be all that much more costly than AIX or Solaris, if you do a good job of negotiating the prices.

Finally, a blurb on Linux;
I have been using Linux since the .99 kernel back in late 1992. It was not ready for prime time then. It is now pretty much ready for the enterprise. Most of the major financial institutions have implemented or will be implementing in 2005 some version of RedHat, Suse, or IBM Linux in their production enterprise. My company will be running Oracle 10g on RHE Edition by late September with about a dozen Oracle Apps. If you want low cost, ease of Admin, value for the price, it is probably time to put some serious thought into Linux, the rest of the planet sure is. However, if you have to go with a Proprietary UNIX flavor, than HP-UX would be my first recommendation.

Oh, and one more thing... Watch out MicroSoft (and all the others), 2005 is most definitely the year for Linux Servers. Desktop is going to take a little longer.

[Thierry Poels_1]

hi,

ask their salesmen the benefits of their OS compared to the oters. They will all give you a very loooonnng list.

anyway my vote goes to HP-UX
regards,
Thierry.

[Sorrel G. Jakins]

From a management perspective:
HPUX is very stable. When incidents occur, our HP systems engineers seem to be right on top of the situation and the problem is resolved quickly. They are highly motivated, and their support structure is solid. HP support is good, and this ITRC forum responds with alacrity and accuracy.

AIX has been good. The AIX syseng's have to deal with teasing from the HPUX syseng's, who nevertheless do help with AIX when needed. AIX incidents seem to take much longer to be resolved. IBM maintenance agreements are very confusing.

[KapilRaj]

I would say hpux is more user(sysadmin) friendly as it does'nt hide things like aix's ODM. But then aix is more advanced than any unix flavour available in the market.

ITRC is toooooo good . I am working with AIX for about 2 years ... I hv'nt found one for aix which is close to ITRC.

Can't comment on sam and smit as i prefer the shell.

OS upgrades are better managed in aix than hpux i think. I heard MC/SG is better than HACMP.

Regds,

Kaps

[Mic V.]

I agree with the previous poster, many times this is a religious discussion. I'm not feeling very "enfranchised" :-) with one versus the other at the moment, so IMO my comments are fairly neutral.

Advantages: In my opinion, HP-UX is very well *engineered*. Things make sense, and error messages help you figure out what to do. HP started out engineering hardware and I think it shows in the approach to software (sometimes to the detriment, but usually as an advantage). (I also think HP's hardware support is superior, but you were asking about the OS.) SAM was excellent when I was learning HP-UX. HP-UX has the ITRC. :-) I've heard that it's possible to get support for Linux, but don't know anyone who's done it; HP support is good. IMO, LVM rocks over anything Sun has ever done for filesystems, but don't know the implications of the advent of VxVM... It seems a lot easier to list your devices and info about them in HP-UX as compared to Solaris. HP-UX systems are a rock assuming you take configure them sanely; I once left an EDI production system up for 2 years (I ended up rebooting it out of paranoia that it wouldn't be able to). Solaris (in my experience) doesn't last so well.

Disadvantages: HP-UX seems to be sufficiently different that it's hard to get open source to compile. A good number of developers don't test on or consider HP-UX. Some commercial vendors (some Cisco products, for example) also don't support HP-UX, seeing it as second tier. The clustering for HP-UX is lukewarm and it's unhappy to hear that they're completely dropping Tru64 (and apparently VMS) clustering.

[Rashid Hamid]

Hi

I have been working in HPUX and AIX environment for couple of years and I think these two OS are most popular compare others UNIX flavours. I'm not sure for SOLARIS. Smitty is cool stuff where we can smitty everywhere and so many time. Correct me if i'm wrong, sam only can use one time per session. SAM a bit slow to run.

AIX can increase / , /var, /home, /usr, /tmp on fly, no need to go to single user mode (if rootvg have enough space). HPUX need Online JFS to do it.

ITRC forum is the best forum so far, compare to AIX forums

Regards
Rashid

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

I'm working with HP-UX, AIX and Linux, no Slowaris. I'll keep it short, because there are already so many reactions

PRO HP-UX:
- Stability
- Scalability
- Disaster recovery
- This forum (still haven't found anything for AIX that comes even close)

PRO AIX:
- LVM (MUCH faster that HP's)
- Free on-line JFS and defrag
- smit (much better than sam)

ANTI AIX:
- Everything is shared, which means that if you (accidently) remove libc.a (rename is bad enough), your system will halt instantly, and a cold install, or full backup recovery is needed. This alone is reason enough for me not to promote AIX. They have no stand-alone shell or anything like that.
- The IBM support. Unless you pay a lot, salesmen promise you everything you will get for their `best' hardware, but once you have it they ask big $$ for every letter in your question.

Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn