USENIX article..comments please.. leaving out HP-UX

[brian_31]

http://www.usenix.org/publications/login/2010-12/index.html

Here’s an article from December 2010 issue of Login; regarding a comparison of Solaris, RHEL, and AIX. They have left out HP-UX..I simply love HP-UX..

Brian.

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Brian:

So send the editors a comment pointing out that there's more to the would than they cared to discuss. Of course, Solaris, AIX and RedHat are a bit "closer' to one another than to HP-UX.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Alzhy]

Maybe they view HP-UX as a sunset UNIX branch?

Remember -- "HP-UX - the Last Itanium Man Standing" - with inferences to the fact that HP-UX runs on expensive Itanium HW that it now is practically the lone supporter/user and is co-developed by the same company that produces the equally (if not exceedingly) awesome Nehalem chips that share some pedigree but at earthly system prices (and runs Linux, Solaris and Windows too - with surprising and unbelievable TCO and performance/RAS even)

We are at our final charge in our UNIX away migration on Proliant Nehalems and it's been so wonderful so far. Our Solaris, HP-UX and all-rounders HAD virtually no problems adjusting to the ease of RHEL systems and the efficiencies it brings. Not to mention -- issue resolution is just a Google away.

Our UNIX footprints of Solaris and HP-UX systems (PAs and IA64's) are now just a handful. We are likley the first sdopters in the industry of these uber-kool, NUMA-based, multi-processing systems sporting the Nehalem monsters -- which I have been naming 'Smart-Irons'.

[Alzhy]

Don't get me wrong though. I am still a HP-UX Fanboi. Mainly due to its uber-conservatism and less bleeding edge (and oft-times "late" technology adoptions) - which makes it a tad more "stable" than the rest.

I can cite several of these technologies but I think most know what they are.

[Terry.giblin]

This reminds me of an English phase: "Horse's for courses"

The trick is to know which one is best, probably, depending on what you want to do, exactly.

[Mel Burslan]

In my opinion, as a 15+ years hpux veteran, foced into wearing an AIX admin hat for the last 3-4 years, AIX is not unix in my opinion. It looks more like a mainframe VM running a close to unix like shell.

Sun, as a BSD family of unix descendant, is not one of my favorite flavors of unix, combined with being marjeted under the umbrella of ORACLE, known for nickeling and diming you, does not have much longer life, as the market leader unix platform.

Linux, at the beginning, had quite a bit of difference from a conventional unix base, but currently, it is safe to say, it is a robust platform and you can not beat the price. And it is cutting edge if you want to go to that far to the edge.

HPUX as someone else said is not cutting edge enough. It is the most conservative unix flavor around, in my opinion and HP's pricing for licensing makes it very unappealing. Given it is the most robust unix for large scale database and computation heavy applications, the only option of running it on Itanium hardware, makes it a quite a bit less desirable.

Having said all this, please keep in mind that, most editorials like this are usually sanctioned by one or more vendors of the products they mentions and in order to keep the repeat business coming, the authors, need to keep the sponsors happy. This might be one of those cases. Just something to keep in mind.

Cheers,

Mel

[brian_31]

Good points...

Brian.

[Steven Schweda]

> Of course, Solaris, AIX and RedHat are a
> bit "closer' to one another than to HP-UX.

"Of course"? I may be dense, but it's not
immediately obvious to me what makes HP-UX
particularly distant from, say, Solaris. Or,
for that matter, what makes any proprietary
UNIX particularly close to any GNU/Linux.

> [...] AIX is not unix in my opinion. It
> looks more like a mainframe VM running a
> close to unix like shell.

I'd say that it looks like what might happen
when people who know how to write a serious
OS take a UNIX spec and (re-) implement it
with some measure of quality. That is, as
if it were intended as a product to be sold,
not as a spare-time academic project. (Which
other people later try to beat into some kind
of shape.) One minor example: Uniquely
numbered error messages, instead of only a
few dozen errno values. Of course, the
result barely resembles other UNIX
implementations, so it tends to look funny if
your expectations have been set entirely by
experience with other UNIX (or UNIX-like)
OS's.

dyi # uname -a
HP-UX dyi B.11.31 U ia64 4235313755 unlimited-user license

dyi # ls -l fred ; echo $?
fred not found
2

dyi # cat fred ; echo $?
cat: Cannot open fred: No such file or directory
2


blue# uname -a
AIX blue 1 6 000F1F6E4C00

blue# ls -l fred ; echo $?
ls: 0653-341 The file fred does not exist.
2

blue# cat fred ; echo $?
cat: 0652-050 Cannot open fred.
2

This is a trivial example, but one can
imagine tracking down something like
"0653-341" or "0652-050" and getting some
actual information about it.


AIX also offers the (animated) SMIT dude,
who's much more fun to watch than anything
either SAM or SMH has (even if you can get
SMH to find your X display).

[brian_31]

HP-UX on the otherhand offers SD-UX ad ignite UX both of which we have extensively used for large application and release implementation across the board. We used to make bundles a package and the release would be as simple as swinstalling the removing in case we need to back out. Teh Development Managers used to simply love it. Since we moved to Linux we have not been able to use a similar feature! Neither Solaris has it.

Brian.

[Alzhy]

Brian - you hit the nail on those 2. Yeah many a hard-core HP-UX 'mins miss those.

That is why I ask them to drop those horse blinders so they see far and wide.

Linux actually has a far richer tools with respect to OS Backups and Package Management... you can do your own rpm's too or yum depots if you wish and it will have the same functionality plus mch more as SWDEPOT and SWPKG sir.

As far as OS Backups.. there's MondoRescue BUT who backs up OSes these days anyway? It is much more efficient to use a backup OS environment (ala DRD) or alternate LVM OS boot env or even your storage array's snapshot capabilities.