HP-UX and beyond

[Edgar_8]

I've just recently passed the HP CSA exam & was in the process of planning for the CSE exam when during a
discussion with colleagues(mostly SUN/IBM/Linux engineers) I was rudely startled by their statements &
wonder whether further HP acreditation is worth the investment? Their statements included the following:
- HP like Tru64 will be added to the extinct list of operating systems;
- HP has no clear definitive roadmap i.r.o O/S(PA RISC vs Itanium vs Linux; ADVFS; TruCluster; Storage etc);
- There will only be 3 major O/S in the near future (MS;SUN;IBM;LINUX)
- quoted statements from SUN executives of the demise of HP

Not being a gullable person, I thought it wise to get feedback from an HP forum, which I would hope will
be subjective, regarding the future of HP(HP-UX) & whether it is worth the time/money investing in
further education on HP products?

Thanks in advance!

[harry d brown jr]

SUN is the company that needs to worry. You have to ask yourself, how far will the M$ & SUN relationship go? Will M$ buy SUN?

SUN claims to embrace linux, yeah right, like a little boy embraces a fat smelly aunt.

Are there questions about HP's roadmap? Sure, but at least they have a road to travel down. At one time SUN was great, but in my opinion they are failing to "get it".

HP has to be concerned about IBM, not SUN.

live free or die
harry d brown jr

[Peter Godron]

Edgar,
nothing in the market is certain.
In my opinion anything you learn will sonner or later come in handy. What you have learnt for HP is mostly portable to SUN and LINUX. We have all seen systems disappear, that were toasted as the sytems of the future.
VMS and COBOL is also still in use today.
As to the statements made by executives;
SUN talking about HP is like Apple talking about MS.

These are only my personal opinions.

[Pete Randall]

Edgar,

Let's look at it this way:

HP introduced HP-UX 11.0 in November of 1997 and it wasn't obsoleted until December 31, 2006 - a little over nine years. They also introduced HP-UX 11i V2 in September of last year. If we project an obsoletion date nine years hence and trust their assurances that they're working on V3, that looks to me like we can plan on HP-UX being around until at least 2015. I would have no reservations about continued certification efforts.

http://www.hp.com/softwarereleases/releases-media2/history/slide2.html


Pete

[Kent Ostby]

Edgar --

As stated above, everything is possible. However, HPUX has a very large installed base with a wide range of customers and is continuing to put out new HW platforms.

While there may be some shift in the mix towards Linux, HP-UX will still be around for quite some time.

Here is some information on where we are going with with HP-UX:

http://www.hp.com/products1/unix/operating/hpux11inov04.html

NOTE: The link to the side under "the story".

Best regards,

Oz

[Tim D Fulford]

It is true that HP plan to phase out PA-RISC CPUs in favour of Intel Itanium. that said, HP will be keeping a close eye on how the markets are responding to Linux, and may respond by rel;easing PA8900 or more if needed. if I was a doctor of spin I would say .. "HP are planning to pase out their CPUs, and have no road map beyond PA8800"... The other stuff convieniently missed out is that HP plan to use a more efficient CPU fabrication/manufacture to leverage the "best of breed" in their hardware offerings.

As far as TruCluster ADVFS is concerned; Any plans before HP & Compaq merger would need to be shelved. This process is not easy. As I understand it this meant that things like ServiceGuard roadmap had to be scrapped & re-looked at in light of Tru64/TruCluster. Again as a doctor of spin "HP have revoked their road maps and do not know where they are going" ... where as it may be better put "HP have re-evaluated their products in light of merger and will incorporate features from the merger into future products, unfortunately older roadmaps will be effected"

Spin Spin city...

Regards

Tim

[Steven E. Protter]

Sun went the way it did because they were weak.

HP has problems as a company, but HP-UX is not one of the problems.

The support organization is strong, and as an advanced user of Linux, given my choice, HP-UX is the way I go.

It's industrial strength, reliable beyond imagination. It's not going anywhere fast.

I would suggest you start studying for the HP-UX CSE exam.

HP-UX is never going to be a market share leader. Its simply the best and I believe HP when they tell me they are solidly behind it.

SEP

[Florian Heigl (new acc)]

a:
"- There will only be 3 major O/S in the near future (MS;SUN;IBM;LINUX)"

that's four, not even having stated their names, further MS is the only company among them that has a clear OS strategy - both Sun and IBM offer various OSses that are competing with each other.
And about linux --- I'd say a Linux release kernel is something like the various BSD's
-current branches, too unstable to bother. not for most people, but on real systems murphy just gets to You.

b:
"- quoted statements from SUN executives of the demise of HP"

Now, actually SUN is the company with a large financial issues, not HP.

c:
If You go to HP-UX courses You won't need Sun courses anymore and vice versa. A bit of RTFM enables You to adapt to any other UNIX quite easily after You aquired some initial knowledge.

Only aix differs enough to justify extra courses.

If You want long-term use out of certification, then take join SAGE and do their exams.

[Ted Buis]

The HP-UX roadmap shows significant enhancements this year for 11i version 2 on both pa-risc and Itanium. HP-UX 11i v3 is targeted for some time in 2006, and v4 shows up beyond that. There are two million HP-UX system out there, so it won't go away anytime soon. Also, the pa-8800 is not the last pa-risc chip. The pa-8900 is planned for release later this year. SUN Solaris 10 containers match up to HP Secure resource partitions, but they have no software vituralization like HP-UX vPars or IBM AIX lpars. SUN SPARC is not competitive and they have had to go to Fujitsu SPARC and AMD Opteron. The x86 and SPARC versions lack data and binary compatibility, so SUN is looking weak to me.

[Edgar_8]

Hi All,

Thanks for the feedback it has re-assured my confidence in HP going forward, however I think it would be prudent of me to also not put all my eggs in 1 basket.

[Duncan Edmonstone]

Edgar,

I would direct your colleagues to have a read of the following before they pronounce the death of HP-UX:

http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/cache/107844-0-0-225-121.html

The reason (in my opinion) that this happens so often is that generally HP marketing and HP staff don't go for this FUD approach with their customers - even the link I sent you is extremely restrained when compared to some of the BS that comes out of Sun CEO Jonanathan Schwartz's mouth - whilst this doesn't play so well with modern IT journalists and analysts (who very much like their more traditional colleagues seem more interested in *making* news than *reporting* news), it is very much liked by many senior IT execs - and after all its their decisions that count...

The simple fact is that too many people immediately believe what they read on a website, or take some biased opinion as gospel - all I can suggest to your IBM/Sun/Linux colleagues is 'show me the facts'

HTH

Duncan

[Andrei Lica_1]

I have 7 years experience with all SCO Unix flavors and linux, 4 years IBM AIX and 4months with HP-UX.
3 years ago some said Unix was to dissapear in few years but is still here. Same for RISC hw. The new version of AIX ( 5L ) and HP-UX ( 11.23 ) are by far better than old versions ( 4.3, 11.xx )
Recently ( my opinion ) I saw an increase of HP-UX admin jobs requests and a decrease of SUN
I think also that actual version of HP-UX is as good as AIX or even better.
Linux is the usable and flexible one. Unix is ugly and unflexible but stable (hmm?) and supported (hmm again-define supported)
We will see an increase for linux and a stable market for unix systems for many years.

I'm certified in SCO unix and AIX. That's enough. Any unix certif is valuable enough for you to get a Unix job no matter what flavor. I changed jobs 4months ago with 0 experience in HP-UX.

And , If I have to choose between unices , my choice is Linux

[Rick Garland]

My thoughts; HPUX and Linux are going to be the market leaders. (Doesn't matter which order.)

It is my belief that SUN is following the same path that SCO did some years ago. Remember SCO, they used to be the world wide leader in the UNIX global market. SUN is going away with the SOLARIS OS in favor of JAVA. I have worked in a SUN shop and I think they need to get their hardware in order - I've had more calls placed to SUN for HW related issues that I care to admit. They used to have a product that beat out the rest of the pack but I believe they are slipping. I think the HPUX OS and the HW is much better.

IBM is phasing out AIX - going to Linux with AIX entensions. Of course legacy systems will still exist for some time. (People seem to like the name IBM and make their decisions based on the name rather than the performance.)

Winblows, right now they rule the desktop. I don't see them making big inroads into the data center - Winblows cannot handle the loads required and it is too unreliable.

In time, Linux will make inroads on the desktop as well. They are coming out with versions that are simple "point and click" applications that the masses prefer.

In my opinion, HP is continuing to move forward with improvements and new features. And the ability to have HW that will run HPUX, Linux, and Winblows on the same HW and simultaneously is something no SUN or IBM has.

Of course they will be legacy systems and I'm sure they will be around quite some time. This will be SUN's relagated position.

[Rick Garland]

One last thought. You are in HP forums so the opinions will be somewhat biased. Just as the statement from the SUN exec who said HPUX is going away.

[Jim Butler]

Your buddies might be right, and I for one, had been losing faith in HP over the past 5 years. In my opinion, sun is travelling along a different path, that may indeed prove to be the right one. They have a better focus on security than any other OS out there, and the sunray thin client technology is very good.
The Solaris 10 OS with the zfs filesystem could revolutionize the way we think about storage, and that, along with the standard cheaper, larger storage systems, may be well-recieved in the marketplace.
If that was all there was to a success story, then Sun may win out, and prove to have the staying power that they need.

Recently, with the departure of CF as the CEO of HP, I believe that there will be a change of course at HP, and that over time, they will refocus on the Core HPUX line. Again time will tell, but there you have my opinion.