Any truth to the rumour that HP may dump HP-UX with COMPAQ deal?

[Geoff Wild]

We had a Sun (yeah, I know) presentation on their new V880 and E15K boxes.
They mentioned comparisons to HP and then said something like "We have heard that if the HP/Compaq deal goes through, then HP is going to dump Unix (HP_UX and TRu64) in favour of WinTel solutions."

Please, tell me that this is just a scare tactic from Sun....

Rgds...Geoff

[harry d brown jr]

Dump HPUX? I doubt it seriously, well, at least not within the next seven years. HP pushes many many hundreds of millions of dollars in hardware for unix solutions. You will see HP, and have seen, HP push linux, especially their secure linux product. Compaq bought DEC a few years ago, and DESTROYED DEC and any hopes of having a decent unix product. Compaq brings to HP a large PC line and storage solutions and that's about it.

live free or die
harry

[Darrell Allen]

Hi Geoff,

That's got to be marketing BS. I very seriously doubt HP would dump HPUX considering its large installed base.

Regarding UNIX replaced by WinTel, hahahahahahahahahah! Oooh, I'm scared!

Darrell

[Thierry Poels_1]

hmmmz, sounds like complete bogus.

HPUX is way to successful (and I suppose profitable) for HP to stop investing in it. I really cannot imagine that HP would kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

BTW Oracle made a similar statement: they said all Informix clients would migrate to Oracle instead of DB/2, after its takeover by IBM.

regards,
Thierry.

[Roger Baptiste]

<>

That's a nice troll ;-) I am hearing it for the first time. Already there is enough opposition from the market on this merger, primarly because it is perceived that Compaq's ailing PC business would weigh down HP's focus from the more fetching server markets.

HP's bread and butter is Unix. The embracing of Linux is a continued indication of that.

-raj

[George_Dodds · Accepted solution]

We've just had our HP account manager round for a visit.
I showed him the post, i had to make him sit down as i thought he was going to keel over with laughter!

I took it as a no then :)

[Marco Paganini]

Hello Geoff,

This looks like one of those Microsoft scare tactics that say that "IIS is the most widely used web server on the internet today". As you can clearly see here (http://www.netcraft.com/survey), IIS doesn't even get close to Apache.

I believe Sun is using the same tactics to improve the market penetration of Slow^H^H^H^HSolaris.

Anyway, I used to believe (a long time ago) that a bearded guy in red came by the end of the year to give me presents. It really sucked when I found otherwise. :)

In your case, it would be a good idea to get that person's telephone number so you can give him a call in a few years to talk about his "predictions". :)

Regards,
Paga

[Wodisch]

Hello Geoff,

I would try to talk with those person's boss/manager and ask him/her about the seriousness of their whole presentation - if it is seriuos as that rumour, then I would tell him/her that Sun is NOT to considered a serious vendor!

Id like the occasional rumour as much as most of us (something to smile/laugh about), but it should not be complete nonsense - at least not when presented in a no-nonsense talk. It sounds like a weather-prediction done from a calculation like here: according to a 10minute observation of light (it is early afternoon here in germany) I do predict that it will NOT get dark for the next few years...

Thanks for the post,
Wodisc

[Mary Ann Lipa]

darn right it will... NOT!!!
in their dreams... maybe?
Unix has been so stable, in fact a very stable platform... will HP dump hp-ux?
in my own opinion, i guess it would not at least in the next few decades...
d_b

[Shahul]

Hi

I don't think HP will do that. If they are doing this, then it is better to dump HP, Not HP unix.

Shahul

[Bill McNAMARA_1]

You must realise though that sun are loosing market share and have made their first loss since 1984 or something like that.

Sun also refuse to release TPC results for their servers ( www.tpc.org )... ask them why..
http://www.hp.com/techservers/news_events/news/2001_11_14.html

ask them also how many single points of failure in their e15k.. then ask them to define a single point of failure.. hah!

here's a link ref the superdome vs the e15k.
I think for cheaper you can get up to 50% perf increase.. with reliability.
http://www.hp.com/products1/servers/scalableservers/superdome/superdome_leadership.html

[Deepak Extross]

Can't help noticing that the HP guys in the forum have no comments to make...
:-)

[Alex Glennie]

Deepak, Oh there's been a lot of rumours ..... I gave up listening to them a while ago ..... I guess if you see a post from some of us "HP guys" along the lines of gun for hire .... then you should start worrying ....... fyi I'm not currently looking for a new job ;)

[John Bolene]

Pretty good source told me that Tru64 will be terminated and the best parts of it put into HP-UX.

HP-UX will be around for many years to come.

[Bill McNAMARA_1]

I doubt too that tru64 will go.
what I've heard is that the good bits of it will be ported to hp-ux such as the beoulf clustering.

I'd imagine a lot of customers would be pretty p'd off if it were to be discontinued early.. and take the blame out on hp for that matter.

I mean, even when compaq tried to can vax, the us army politely told them not to..

I'd imagine the two OSes and HW will stick around in some form or another like they have for the last 20 or so years... even though compaq have sold most of the good stuff I do like the dec's/compadecs seeing as it was on alphas that I learnt UX all that long ago....

Bill

[Sebastien Masson]

On my side, I already ear this kind of rumour but the last one I got from SUN (again) is with the HP & Compaq deal, HP will try to eliminate duplace OS support and build, and one of this OS currently support everything is Linux... and they will replace HP-UX and Tru64 with Linux.

That's really funny because Linux is not enought realible to me to run on my critical server (even if service guard exist for Linux).

By the way, someone already ear something regarding future of HP-UX (11.20 ? 12.00). I know they supose to release a version where we will be able to put the OS in VxVM (11.20). This already exist for Itanium but they supose to port that for PA-RISC soon.

[Bill McNAMARA_1]

you'll find the 10.20 discontinuance letter at http://www.hp.com/go/hpux11
and guide to upgrade to 11.00

11.20 is a port of 11.11 (or 11i to itanium)
so the port is from 11i for pa-risc

it sure is a bit complicated, even once you've heard it a few times, 11i v1.5 11i v2.0 on pa one ia.. sheesh!
Anyway you'll find it all on the url above..
Later,
Bill

[W Sanders]

If HP-Compaq are to eliminate duplication, I am sure the ancient creaky (but fast!) Tru64 OS would be the one to go. I doubt HP makes any money keeping on HP-UX, but the only real alternative would be Linux on PA-Risc, and that would be Enterprise-ready only after a lot of development. SGI tried the Linux tactic and it went nowhere.

I am sure this is Sun BS.

Still, I hope HP doesn't do anything stupid. This is not a merger of equals! (OK, I am prejudiced - I have a Compaq laptop and it is a piece of junk.)

[Josh_13]

W Sanders-

i know one person who swears by compaq. everyone else i know who has ever dealt with them has had problems... varied as they are, i can honestly say that if you take that one person out of the equation, they have a 100% success rate at having their machines suffer from the computer equivalent of SIDS. that's right. not one i know of outside of thse used by the guy who swears by them has ever survived past 60 days and been operable.most are sent for repairs by day 30.

the way i see it, you're not biased, you've just expirienced compaq hardware.

[Craig Rants]

Desperate times call for desperate measures. HPUX is second in market share and catching up on Sun. I've worked on most unix platforms, and from my experience, Sun has been a little cocky for quite a while and now they are panicing because things are a little bumpy. Next time you run into this guy call him on his line of bull let him know that you expect honesty and integrity from your vendors and maybe thats why Sun is having all their problems.

C