HPUX market share

[swtw]

Hi all,

Does anyone has any facts, statistics, or reports on HPUX in the following:

1. Current market share for HPUX
2. Which industry sectors are using UX heavily?
3. How is UX security features compare with other UNIX flavors?

TIA.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

You'll get a thousand answers on market share.

1. Among Proprietary Unixes, you will find HP-UX in general second in market share to Solaris. Due to perceived cost factors, Linux far exceeds both.

2. Defense industry is heavy with HP-UX. The U.S. military uses it in many applications for reasons of reliability and security. Here in Israel its also used heavily in the defense sector. Manufacturing is known to use it in large numbers as well.

3. HP-UX has all the standard security features and works with add in software such as Bastille, TCP Wrappers, has a firewall implementation.

In summary if the actual applications you want to run work with HP-UX, its an industrial strength tool that can do the job for you. It has its quirks, is not necessarily as secure out of the box as Linux these days, but can be made as secure as is reasonable save pulling the network cable and having a closed system.

SEP

[swtw]

Hi Steven, thanks for your prompt reply.

My company is evaluating which flavours of UNIX to choose from (not Linux): HPUX, Solaris, or AIX.

Someone who is currently using Solaris (not bias) told me that HPUX is consider an "old" OS and will not be that "vibrant" in years to come. As my company is mainly using HP products, I have certain sentiment towards HP.

So would like to find out the future of UX? What is the adoption rate of UX in the industries etc, before I can make a decision.

TIA.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

The argument against HP-UX that has been made is a misrepresentation or error.

http://h20219.www2.hp.com/hpux11i/downloads/HPUX%20Public%20Roadmap.pdf

The link above is a roadmap for HP-UX.

HP-UX is strong, vibrant and industrial strength. The most reliable OS I've ever worked with.

If you look to long term viability, Sun nearly collapsed a few years ago and HP is an enormous company with excellent long term stability.

HP's support, which includes this website and world class response centers around the globe, sets the standard for support.

So if your applications will run on HP-UX, there is no reason not to go with it.

SEP

[Torsten.]

You all know the never ending discussion between windows and linux users about what is the best and so on ... it's sometimes very similar about different flavours of unix.

;-)

Regarding this "old" OS - old in terms of a long history IMHO only, see

http://h20219.www2.hp.com/hpux11i/downloads/HPUX%20Public%20Roadmap.pdf

[siva baskaran]

i am just trasnfering my idea only (personal opinion)
1. Current market share for HPUX
Current Market share is well & good still keep on increasing than other O.S, because of so many acceptable reasons (But my personal opinion is still has to improve lot in hpux coding(in customization)becoz i love to work in hpux so whenever i find some defective which would be available in other O.S, but most features are not availed in other O.S but would be in hpux.

overall is we can say good

2. Which industry sectors are using UX heavily?
as per experience
within hpux we can select environment flavours depends on environment according to our usage production, non-production, devlopment or designing etc.,

Mainly in Production Environment or we can
say Mission Critical Environment

then in Delopment or Designing Evironment
some of my Oracle friends recommanding hpux best suitable for DB

3. How is UX security features compare with other UNIX flavors?

that we can select as per our environment, if you want highly secure O.S select Mission Critical Envrionment hpux if you want less security tht also we can install.

and some guys are saying that Linux is highly secured i don't find anything like that, yes can say by not technical guys becoz who doesn't how to edit some files, why linux is secured is by default most of security releated files would be disabled, if we are enabling that files that's it security level.

so security level in hpux is moderated one, and when we are taling about security that should be customized one because when we following standard security policies that is not good security in IT,

if hp adds some more(on line [means no downtime] features in V3 and later version, hpux is best among all O.S

still as now no one can beat support & service's of hp (SLA & commiment is so good with hp). because high end enterprises lifetime or life sycle to be considered not only above these factor, so many factor involve suscetain and keep on success in competitive Market.

Thanks & Regards
Siva

[dirk dierickx]

I think the perception of 'old' OS comes from the fact that the HP userland is so so so outdated, even compared to solaris and it's almost scandalous when compared to linux.

At the same time it seems that each new version of hpux only contains minor changes while you'll see flashy funky stuff happening on each new release of solaris and linux.

Solaris and linux are not ashamed to rip out bad stuff and replace it with something new. solaris still cares about backwards compatibility, linux doesn't care so much. And releases follow up pretty fast, RH has one ready each 1.5 years or so. solaris is not releasing that fast but they do continue adding new stuff to current solaris versions.

For me hpux is also a pay-through-your-nose OS. need something 'special' (if you want to call it that) pay a license fee, want something else, pay again. at the same time, most of this stuff is available by default on the others.

solaris and hpux have a pretty clean design imho. they keep to the old unix mantra of KISS (keep is simple stupied), hpux seems over-engineered on everything they do.

and last but not least (for me that is) hpux is still closed shut. solaris is even opened up these days, linux has always been. that's an advantage, that's a battle hp can't keep fighting and expect to win.

what are we using hpux for? everything that is high availability (read: HA-clustering). not that the others can't do it, though. but it was set as a standaard.

[Rasheed Tamton]

Hi,

I have worked on six flavours of UNIX and I like HP-UX the most. And I always try to stick with HP-UX though time to time I have to still work on the others.

1. I do not have good idea but what I heard was that it is far far better than SUN.

2. What I found is that the finance and telecom sectors are heavily using HP-UX.

3. Unless you harden it by your own ways, all the OS can be unsecure. As mentioned above, HP has all the tools to make it very secure but you have to use the tools correctly.


Rgds.

[Wim Rombauts]

For myself, I only have expirience with HP-UX (for what the "old" unixes is concerned).

I am pretty happy with the functionality and the way things work. We run multiple applications with different workloads on one HP-UX installation (a serviceguard cluster in fact), using the Workload Manager software to give each application what it diserves.
But when I look at the software market, I must notice that most of the time, HP-UX is the first UNIX that is NOT on the list of supported OS'es.
That while Solaris (and of course Linux) mostly is, and AIX is in between.

And after all (t.m.h.o), I don't think you need to choose an OS for it's functionality. You need to choose an OS that can run your application(s). If you have one OS that can run almost all of your applications, maintenance of all these systems will become much easier compared to having a mix of OS'es and configurations for every application.

[Steve Boniwell]

As a user over the years of HPUX, Solaris, Linux (and briefly AIX), I would observe that they are all based on an "old" standard (Google the web for the history of Unix timeline) but HP are currently doing most OS development (SUN orienting their efforts to Intel based platforms)and HP have some of the best sysadmin tools of any of the competition (Ignite-UX, Glance etc. HPUX is generally considered as the most secure Unix in the industry (Check Gartner)and supports the majotity of common applications in both technical and commercial fields.

BTW - I do not work for HP but am an independent consultant in the UK.

All my own opinions after 20+ years in the industry. Hope it is of some use

[run zhang]

1. I think the current market share are declining for all flavors of Unix because Linux is making in-roads into the low end Unix market.First we see the web and app layer migrated to Linux now more and more databases are moving too. But by the end Unix will hang around for a long time to come if not forever.major reason:cost of course.
2.who use Unix? all sectors as long as they have some extra money to spend or real need for speed, reliability: finance, telecom, government, education, retail, utility. you name it. with all the progress Linux made its still not mature enough for real high end. It can be like angel in one case and devil in another case. maybe its born with some generic defect because of its open nature, who known. all I known is with something good also comes with something bad.
3.solaris is like a young man, AIX is like an old man, hp-ux is like a middle aged man, choice is yours. this can also be a general guide which sector like which.

[VK2COT]

Hello,

There is a place and space for every O/S
to flourish (even Microsoft Windows :)).

Although I am a Unix/Linux/MacOS fan
(with several years of VMS experience too),
there is no doubt that Unix suffered a bit
during 2008.

Note that I have worked on Unix and Linux platforms for 23 years and try to
stay unbiased. I worked and used more than
20 flavours of Unix and even owned and
managed a Linux-based ISP for 10 years
in Australia.

To prove it, see some of my presentations:

http://www.circlingcycle.com.au/Unix-and-Linux-presentations/

As writer Mark Twain said long ago something
along these lines "There are lies,
damn lies, and statistics".

Take them with a grain of salt.

Anyway, according to IDC 3CQ08 (report
done for the third-quarter 2008):

a) HP is #1 in high-end Unix server revenue with 41.1% market share and IBM #2 (38.
6%). Sun is #3 with 14.7%. HP gained 4.6 ppts share YoY.

d) HP holds a #2 position in total WW Unix
server revenue with 27.9% market share,
statistically tied with Sun (28.5%), while IBM is #1 (35.9%).

c) HP continues its strong #1 worldwide
total server shipment position in 3CQ08
(35.3% mkt share; #1 for 26 quarters in a row).

d) This is interesting: HP continues to lead
in the WW Linux market with 37.8% revenue
market share. HP also has the #1 position in
unit shipments with 36.3% market share, while
Dell is #2 with 23.5%.

And so on.

One interesting fact that should raise
attention in supercomputer environments -
of the top 500 supercomputer systems
(source http://www.top500.org):

439 (87.8 percent) run Linux
23 (4.6 percent) run Unix

There are 31 supercomputers that run a mix of Linux and Unix, plus a couple that run MacOS or BSD.

Ten years ago, 99.4 percent of top 500 supercomputers ran some Unix!

I believe HP-UX has bright future and
11.31 offers myriad of security and
performance improvements. Its features
are very competitive. Take some time
to read more about HP-UX 11.31 at
http://docs.hp.com.

Pity most admins are not even aware of them.
For example, wherever I go, I still see SUDO
and/or Super used for privileged access
delegation (instead of Role Based Access
Control). Old habits die hard.

I also do not see SRP and auditing used as
often as it should. HP-UX virtualizations
are excellent and improving as we speak...

Cheers,

VK2COT

[ken halbrecht]

I would recommend you seek out your own information directly from Gartner and IDC as far as market share and innovation go. I would not recommend leveraging a free forum on HP's website, or any public blog or even a Wiki to get facts.

As an example, from 3Q08, for IDC highend servers (>$250k) the data I have is dramatically different from that represented in this discussion stream. (See attached file)

Likewise, if you are interested in Oracle Apps support of Itanium, I would go to Oracle's Briefing center for an answer and no where else.

Get the facts.

[Duncan Edmonstone]

Ken,

If you redefine what is a high end server (IDC say its >$500K but for some reason you've moved that to >$250K), then your stats will look different.

The great (or terrible) thing about statistics is that two wildly different positions can be substantiated from the same set of data.

And whilst we are "getting our facts" and questioning how neutral some stats on a HP forum might be, would you like to declare any vested interests here (like maybe being an IBM server salesman?)

Going back to the original question - market share figures are reasonably uesful for confirming that you aren't dealing with some niche player, but they certainly aren't a sensible basis for making purchasing decisions (otherwise we'd all still be using IBM Mainframes wouldn't we?)

HTH

Duncan

[Duncan Edmonstone]

and yes, cards on the table = I'm a HP employee...

Duncan