HP-UX stretches over new Superdome 2 HP was awfully quiet about shipping its 32-socket Superdome 2 server last month. Neither have they made much noise about their biannual update for the HP-UX 11i v3 operating system that runs on their Itanium-based servers. Perhaps they were too busy buying Autonomy for $10.3bn and trying to finesse a spin-off of their PC …
I would never buy another Stuperdoom. Oracle will never support Itanium for future releases and has shitcanned support already. They used to be great partners but now are not even frienimies...the hate is very evident. HP blames Oracle for the mess they are in when the reality is HP has been without a long term strategy for years and find themselves late to the dance. Every middleware company worth acquiring is gone. The only thing left is BMC but that competes with HP's only decent product openview.
The only question is HP proliant with Oracle or IBM Power and using DB2 as a great negotiation tool. We might even move the SAP DB to DB2 and our BI workload. Those are pretty easy and would give us the leverage over Oracle we need in our negotiations.
No fan of leisure suit Larry
I'm afraid HP has lost most of its credibility as a company with a vision. The NY times and WSJ can't be wrong when they point out the big mess their strategy has been during the last year or so. All along the lines of "WebOS is strategic and we'll make a new, real iPad-killer"..."After all we dump tablets and WebOS altogether"..."Oh wait, after all we kind of keep WebOS"..."We're the most profitable PC manufacturer and it's a strategic maket segment for us"..."Well, after careful thinking, we shall get rid of that business" etc.
In the challenging times the Itanium market definitely is facing, who can still trust HP when they claim their commitment to that line of products? Who can still invest big bucks in that iron when there's a significant risk of HP suddenly deciding to dump that line of products?
And I'm not even speaking of their customer support going down the drain, with the tech support for their HP-UX line of products now in the same (outsourced overseas) hands that (fail to properly) manage customer calls for consumer products.
Good luck as a software company with the new toy you've bought yourself (Autonomy). As a server and PC manufacturer, I'm afraid you're no longer a credible contender to me.
Not on the main point ... but Tru64 and the associated TruCluster products never ran on VAX hardware ... it was always an OS for the Alpha platform, and to the best of my knowledge never successfully ported to any other architecture - despite HP's worst efforts!
And in any case - who cares about HP-UX any more - post the Oracle debacle isn't it going the same way as Tru64 anyway.
And BTW - anticipate that the reference to September 2009 update should read 2011?
Actually, Compaq had already stated their intent to drop Alpha and move to Itanium prior to the HP buy out. At the point of sale Tru64 had already been successfully ported to Itanium and was running in the labs. HP could have used it, or portions of it. AdvFS, the cam scsi layer and TruCluster were all offered. In the end it came down to numbers. At the time there were ~600K Tru64 customers world wide .vs. 1.6M for HP-UX. Dropping the Veritas filesystem and cluster suite to foist something new and unknown on the HP-UX customer base was considered too risky. A customer poll indicated they didn't want it, and Veritas offered some sweeteners to make sure the decision went their way. So it had nothing to do with technology benefits/limitations; it was a business decision.
what kind of article includes a table (which in general is a helpful concept)
and presents it as
A
FRIGGING
IMAGE
Look guys, I may not be an html expert, but I believe that both HTML and its predecessors all the way back to the various flavours of nroff groff troff etc support the concept of tables. Y'know, things that can contain text (including both letters and numbers) that can even if required be cut and pasted into other things, and for the visually challenged they can beread by text-to-speech gadgets, etc.
You're as bad as the IT depratment (sic) I read about who in a recent set of instructions used a camera to do their screen captures...
FFS.
Must.... calm.... down....
Of course the main Linux distribution that most people think of when saying something vague like "Linux" would be RedHat. Whilst the per-socket cost (or actually per 2-socket cost) is the same regardless of how many sockets you have, you have to pay more if you are using virtualisation, depending on the number of guests you have. HP-UX you pay the same regardless of the number of guests
I'm not really arguuing that HP-UX is cheaper than Linux - merely that your argument is fallacious. Costs for OS platforms depend on much more than the number of cores/sockets you happen to have...
@theodore:
The price calculation works a bit different, there's no base price, and [almost] no smallest datacenter model.
The prices listed in the table count for HP-UX licenses, based on
a) functionality included: Base, Virtual System Environment, High Availability Environment, Data Center (Base+VSE+HA)
b) System tier
c) number of sockets (previously cores) actually populated _and_ used.
So if you calculated 32 sockets times 33,390 $, this would be the cost of HP-UX license for the Datacenter OE, having all 32 sockets in use.
I wouldn't call that a "small datacenter model", it would actually be the biggest possible configuration.
The article said:
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The Veritas file system, by the way, was bundled with the HP-UX operating system after HP decided in the wake of the Compaq acquisition that the TruCluster clustering and file system extensions to Tru64 Unix for VAX and Alpha machines did not mesh well with HP-UX after all, as had been planned.
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Not quite. The VxFS filesystem had been part of HP-UX for a long time (over 5 years before that happened.) What happened when the TruCluster integration was ditched was the HP-UX adopted the cluster version of VxFS as well and integrated it with Serviceguard.
VxFS or "JFS" as it is known on HP-UX was integrated into HP-UX way way before that, as was VxVM if you cared to use it rather than LVM (and the integration was sooo much better than the integration of VxFS and VxVM into Solaris ever was - anyone who attempted Solaris upgrades with encapsulated root disks could testify to that).
Aslo I'm pretty sure that System Containers have been around for a while in "web release" format - this is just the first time they've been integrated into the install/update media.
> The Veritas file system, by the way, was bundled with the HP-UX operating system after HP decided in the wake of the Compaq acquisition
The Veritas filesystem has been bundled with HP-UX since the release of HP-UX 10.01 in September 1995, after it failed to meet the cut line for 10.00 release earlier that year.
Nice article otherwise.
My greatest grouse with HP has always been their "nickel-and-dime" approach to things.
Okay...you pay $$$/core for the base OS + $$$/core for Virtualization + $$$/core for Multipathing + $$$/core for Resource Management capabilities ....end result is that dinosaur organizations end up paying gargantuan prices for an obsolete OS. Contrast that with Solaris or Linux (at the entry-level)...it's a no-brainer...HP-UX should be retired and HP should get out of the Server game.
Why on earth should anyone care about HP-UX? (and no, I'm not trolling)
"....Contrast that with Solaris or Linux (at the entry-level)...." With every Integrity server you get the base OE package included, so if all you're doing is entry-level serving (I'm guessing webserving since you mentioned Slowaris), it's all there already. It's only when you want to move up into virtualisation or high-availability that you need any of the other bundles. Oh, and hp-ux 11i v3 can multipath natively, has been able to for years. Can I suggest you need to update your knowledge more than just a tad.
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