PA-RISC vs. Integrity ???

[Randy Hagedorn]

Hi,

I have been exploring the newest HP-UX Integrity servers based on the Intel Itanium processor.

Can anyone give some insight on what the major and minor differences between PA-RISC systems and the Integrity?

Is Integrity the way of the future or does PA-RISC still have merit?

Thanks,
Randy

[harry d brown jr · Accepted solution]

Integrity aka Itanium is the way to go for HP-ux. The PA-Risc line will eventually fade away.

They are very different architechures.

live free or die
harry d brown jr

[Pete Randall]

The major difference is that Itanium servers can run Windoze, Linux or HP-UX, while PA-RISC can run HP-UX period.

As Harry says, eventually we will not have a choice because HP will no longer be offering PA-RISC.



Pete

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Randy:

The two papers below offer quite a bit of information.

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

http://www.hp.com/products1/unix/operating/pdf/HP-UX_Binary_Compatibility.pdf

While the Itanium lineage is the pathway that will continue to evolve, the PA-RISC remains very, very viable at present.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Mel Burslan]

PA RISC will offically be supported by HP for another 10 years or close to that if that is what you are wondering about. But as they (HP) will sell this class of CPU's anymore, upgrade path will be blocked.

As harry also indicated, the two are totally different architectures and incompatible. The biggest roadblock right now is the application porting from one platform to the other. Most major software developers, like Oracle, SAP, PeopleSoft have announced their products' availability on on IA64 (itanium) platform and if you are going to run one of those big app.s you should be in good shape. On the other hand, if you are in a position to support in-house developed and compiled applications, it is at your best interest to bring a couple of small size machines and have the developers start recompiling their code and start debugging the problems as early as possible.

You really do not want to find yourself one day with almost no support and an application which is no longer functioning on your PA RISC servers.

Hope this helps a little

[Kent Ostby]

Also, while there will be bug fixes for problems on the OS's that cover PA-RISC, its very likely that new feature sets will be focused primarily onto the new OS releases which will only be (after 11.31) available for Integrity servers.

PA-RISC will be a nice stable platform for the next several years, but Integrity is where the bells and whistles will go.

[Alzhy]

PARISC is on its last technology refresh - with the PA-8900 dual core CPUs.

Itanium is the future of HP-UX and HP's Enterprise Server Strategy. It's already matured but a bit late with its own dual core implementation.

HP-UX on Integrity is w/o a question faster. PARISC systems still abound due to the hesitance of large and small corporates to migrate to the processor as most workloads can still be handled by the architecture/OS combo even if it is a bit costly.

Are they compatible?

Yes .. for now. HP-UX 11i version 2 (aka HP-uX 11.23) is a common release for both Itanium and PARISC systems and is the way for a "seamless" migration to Integrity systems. PARISC binaries are supposedly able to run unmodified on the Intenrity environments through the "Aries" translator -- with some performance penalty of course. Most apps can simply be recompiled though.

How fast are enterprises "preparing" with migrating 11.11 (aka 11i version 1) to 11.23 so they can be prepared with the transition to Integrity? Unknown? My enterprise has not even thought of the idea yet.

Har far out will 11.11 be supported.. word has it that it will be supported un to 2011. The same possibky with the PARISC hardware...


HTH,.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom Randy,

Few things to know:

1) HP-UX v3 is due this year and is supposedly the last PA-RISC release of HP-UX.
2) Especially at the low end, PA-RISC servers are in their last generation.
3) Support for PA-RISC is promised through 2012 or 2017. I don't know what that means for the OS release.
4) The same money buys more raw processing power in the Integrity line. Saw some graphs at a recent meeting that demonstrated this fact.

SEP

[Geoff Wild]

Yes, Itanium is the way of the future - 8900 is the last parisc chip from HP.

Other threads related on this:

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=733881

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=580677

I have as my workstation, a RX2600 - havn't had time to do any benchmarking - but it runs very nicely indeed.

As far as running in the rest of our environment - probably atleast a year out still.

Rgds...Geoff

[rick jones]

Minor nit - there is a PA-RISC Linux out there, so HP-UX is not the only OS one can run on PA-RISC.

Still, Integrity is the place to be.

[Sung Oh]

Integrity server will be the best bet, you can load, Windows, Linux, HPUX, and OVMS. if you are thinking about partition systems, the mid-range server will do the trick for you. you can configure the each partition to be different OSs in one intergrity server.

http://www.hp.com/products1/servers/integrity/mid_range/index.html

Sung.

[Edgar_10]

Hi All,

With the PA-RISC and introduction of IA(Itanium/Integrity) architecture it appears as if HP has lost market share in comparison to IBM's Power 5+ & released or soon to be released Power 6 architecture.

Is the above statement a valid observation and should one be concerned.

thanks in advance!

[Duncan Edmonstone]

Edgar,

Lost market share of what? UNIX systems? Servers? Elephants?

In this industry, there's always a statistic to back up someones position. You could take a look at some of HP's competitive info against IBM/Sun here if you're interested:

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

It's certainly true that IBM are taking advantage of a window of opportunity where customers are looking to move off PA-RISC - they'd be baffling not to, but that doesn't mean that Integrity servers aren't a strong and viable option in the market - after all, what can you run on Power? AIX and a version of Linux with very little adoption. As others have pointed out, on Integrity we can run HP-UX, Windows, Linux (OK not as popular as the x86 version, but still a LOT more popular than the Power version) and OpenVMS.

Also its important to understand how IBM 'allegedly' goes about acquiring market share - 'buying the business' is what I often hear. It's not uncommon to find that IBM has 'given' a customer the full Tivoli suite of software to guarantee server business.

Naturally as a lover of all things HP, you can expect my views to be as skewed as those of an IBM'er, so take with a pinch of salt if you wish.

HTH

Duncan

[Duncan Edmonstone]

Oh, and 'soon to be released Power 6'

I don't think IBM have a release date scheduled for Power6 - they originally said 2006, and recent press reports have indicated they're now saying 2007. IBM have as much of a track record as Intel for slipping processor release dates, so I wouldn't hold your breath for that.

And if Power5 is anything to go by, customers will be looking at box, swaps and OS/application upgrades to adopt Power6 - seems like a wonderful opportunity for HP to do to IBM exactly what IBM are trying to do to HP right now.

Swings & Roundabouts...

Duncan

[Edgar_10]

Hi Duncan,

With regards to the market, I believe it was with reference to IBM servers/Unix market. We were shown a Gartner/IDC report which depicted that IBM deployed more IBM Unix servers than HP or SUN and that the trend will continue in light of their Power architecture successes.
Thanks for the reference page regarding HPs roadmap.

Thanks in advance!

[Matthew Ghofrani]

As to answer the original question, here are some major differences.
- Integrity chips can share CPU among the virtual partitions as granular as %5 of a single CPU whereas PA-RISC can not
- Integrity chips can share the same HBA among virtual partitions whereas PA-RISC can not
- Integrity chips allow the existence of different ServiceGuard version mixing whereas PA-RISC can not
- Integrity chips can have pay as you use, CPU (even as little as hourly) whereas PA-RISC can not

Matthew From Boston

[Jan van den Ende]

Duncan wrote


Oh, and 'soon to be released Power 6'

I don't think IBM have a release date scheduled for Power6 - they originally said 2006, and recent press reports have indicated they're now saying 2007


Yes, but that has to be seen in the same light as the Intel IA64 pre-announments that are, well, "not always realised".

In that respect there are not too many differences. :-(

It really needs a lot of reading between the lines to distill realistic future prognoses, no matter which supplier.

It makes the decisions to be made rather more of a gamble than is business-wise sound, but then again, doing nothing is garanteed to be the wrong choice.

"May you live in interesting times" is an OLD curse!

fwiw,

Proost.

Have one on me.

jpe

[dirk dierickx]

HP is not making a secret out of it that Itanium is the way to go. PARisc could still be a valid choice _if_ you run some piece of software that doesn't have a Itanium version yet.