Latest version of HPUX

[Shivkumar]

Any reason why HPUX 11.31 is scrapped ?

[Duncan Edmonstone]

aaarrrggh! are wa all TRYING to do Sun and IBMs work for them - I've read more FUD in this post than on both those companies websites!

11iv3 (aka 11.30 or 11.31 or whatever) iS NOT dropped, it should launch sometime in 06' (I don't know a date).

To get the facts straight - 11iv3 WAS going to contain all the TruCluster Single System Image and AdvFS cluster filesystem technology from Tru64 - however HP went out and talked to their BIGGEST HP-UX customers and got told - "its taking too long! we want a clustered filesystem sooner" - so HP dropped the TruCluster/AdvFS functionality from 11iv3 to instead integrate Veritas' Cluster File System into HP-UX - this was all announced back last December here:

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

Most of this functionality has now shipped in Serviceguard 11.17 (release notes here http://docs.hp.com/en/B3935-90085/B3935-90085_IMR1.pdf ) with some final qualification still required before we see the full cluster filesystem functionality available in the next few months.

This DOESN'T mean that HP have pulled 11iv3 - it simply means you won't see a cluster filesystem released with 11iv3 (if you want one you'll already be able to get that on 11iv2 via the Serviceguard/Veritas integration). What do we know about 11iv3? Well HP's been pretty coy about specifics but we do know:

-There will be plenty of performance enhancements to take advantage of the course-grained multi-threading features of Montecito.
-There should be a new IO stack which will better handle SAN storage
-Some of the 'single virtual view' features alluded to in the roadmap change document will start to become available.
-I'd expect to see more enhancements to take advantage of partitioning technologies such as Integrity Virtual Machines.

HTH

Duncan

[Duncan Edmonstone]

Haha I reall should proof read more! I meant 'more FUD in this thread', not 'more FUD in this post'.

Duncan

[Shivkumar]

Duncan; Is course-grained multi-threading available in 11.23 or 11.11 too ? How does this threading mechanism helps ?

Thanks,
Shiv

[Shivkumar]

Can 11.23 handle SAN more efficiently than 11.11 ? In my environment i am pushing for 11.23 or later but some folks are trying to stick to the ideology "OLD is GOLD" and are resisting the upgrade on the pretext that existing application might break.

My take was newer release of os supports lower version.

Thanks,
Shiv

[Arunvijai_4]

It depends on the SAN environment you have, the equipements, drivers, etc.. I would say this, 11.23 is being supported by all vendors of SAN and you see can more of it too (support).

-Arun

[Steven E. Protter]

Probably no real difference in efficiency for the SAN Shiv,

There may be higher limits on number of LUNS for a non-hp array, but I see full support for 11.11.

SAN efficiency is not reason alone to go with a higher version of HP-UX. If your applications support it, going to a higher version means one less future upgrade.

SEP

[R.KrishnaKumar]

Hi ShivKumar,

The latest verion of the HP-UNIX is HPUX-11.23. This supports both windows and unix.
This support SAN environment also.

"Support for networking and storage solutions for Itanium-based systems,
including dynamic expansion of storage components and extended support for
Gigabit Ethernet and Gigabit Fibre Channel interconnects." -- According to the whitepaper published by IDC.

regards,
Krishna

[R.KrishnaKumar]

Shiva,
The latest one is HP-UX 11i v2,

regards,
Krishna

[Duncan Edmonstone]

FOr whats new in 11iv2 see this doc:

http://h71028.www7.hp.com/erc/downloads/hpux-11i-v2-overview-sept04-v19-050510.pdf

As CMT will only be introduced with the arrival of the Itanium2 processor code-named 'Montecito', some time next year, the support for it in 11iv2 is effectively moot.

What does CMT give you? Extra performance by allowing multiple threads of execution in a processor core - the aim being (if I understand correctly - I'm no processor expert) to reduce 'stalls' - i.e. long latency events such as cache misses etc.


HTH

Duncan

[Ted Buis]

This is getting of the topic, since Montecito is in the Itanium family of processors, but it a dual core processor with each processor capable of processing two threads. But while the dual core come closest to doubling performance over a single thread, the dual threads per core helps less. Basically, if the processor core is stalled and waiting on a memory fetch, then it can relatively quickly switch to processing a second thread. But there can be draw backs. While each of the processor cores has its own cache, when you run two threads on each core, they must share the cache for that core, so running two processes on a single core can have the effect of reducing the amount of cache for each process. HP-UX 11i v2 will be able work in this new environment, but 11i v3 should be better optimized for it, but only on Montecito based Itanium servers. There will be other features in 11i v3, but the feature set may not be fully defined at this time, so it would be premature for HP to talk about it.

[Shivkumar]

What does it mean by the statement "HPUX-11.23 supports both Windows and Unix" ? How come one os will run another os ?

[Ted Buis]

Where are you reading that? HP-UX 11.23 supports CIFS so can be a Windows file server, but don't support Windows. Integrity servers can run either Windows, LINUX, HP-UX or OpenVMS, but that isn't what you quote.