HPE promises users Itanium server refresh next year. In Dutch! HPE has told a news outlet in The Netherlands that it's pressing ahead with an Itanium refresh for 2017. The last devotee of the architecture it built with Intel in the late 1990s – which among other things was behind its long lawsuit with Oracle – told Computable last week that the refresh based on the Itanium Kittson chip …
"HP-UX will let users keep alive apps they can't rewrite, running them in Linux-hosted containers"
It would be fascinating to know how Itanium applications will run on x86, even if they are running in containers. Are they counting on re-compiling from source, or are they doing something else? However they're doing it, it looks like HP wants to move their HP-UX customers to Linux before someone else does it for them.
HP-UX was at one time promised to get an infusion of VMS file system and cluster technology, but that never happened.
That would have been a clustering and file system infusion from Tru64, with the clustering technology being based more or less on VMS's clusters.
It's not Unix, it's DEC VMS.
Bollocks. OpenVMS is something different entirely than HPUX (which itself is something almost entirely but not quite unlike Unix*). The only thing they have in common is that they run on IA64.
* HPUX can best be described as a Unix that has been left on a dusty shelf for half a decade, then subjected to a superficial cleaning and having some odds and sods added.
To me the fact that HP-UX 11 was released back in the late 90s and now almost 20 years later it's still calling itself 11 is a sign it's going nowhere fast (no matter how many point release tweaks they make to the name). You would have thought in all that time they might have made a bit of an effort in all that time to call something HP-UX 12.
In the same time even Solaris has managed to go from 7 to (a rather dragged out) 11.
Well to be honest 11.31 has little in common with 11.00, but even 11.31 was 2007. I think they canned 11.41 years back. Some marketing zeeb decided that SW vendors didn't like the major release number changing so they decided to just keep calling it HP-UX 11 for ever, 11.00 -> 11.11 was a bigger kernel change than 10.20 -> 11. Same with 11.11 to 11.23 and yet again with 11.23 to 11.31.
Didn't Sun do something similar with Solaris, weren't they all 2.X for years?
'That could also leave HPE the last vendor to keep an honest-to-goodness Unix alive all the way to half-way through the next decade.'
Um, what? Despite the random mention of Oracle not wanting to support their /database software/ on Itanium systems, they're still producing Solaris and despite IBM not selling Itaniums they're still selling AIX on POWER. I'm not aware that either of those is going away any time soon.
HP-UX makes one feel young again, like it is 1988. Sad that customers have been screwed over by HP, which did not modernize the product in the last 15 years. Since the last Itanium servers were announced in 2005, nothing happened. Sometimes it takes quite some talking to convince users that Linux on a recent Xeon or IBM p-Series is 1500% faster, and I/O on the same Xeon does over 300 MByte/sec on a system with a smart-array controller, instead of a meager 90 MByte/sec.
The world of these systems is interesting, I know two major companies who are tied to discontinued HP9000 PA-Risc systems running essential applications, in their opinion, migrating to a modern platform is too much work. Those owning function HP9000 PA-Risc hardware should sit tight on it, it might be worth a lot one day, even when your smart phone has more memory, cpu and storage capacity.
It's hardly 15 years. HP-UX 11.31 was 2007. The HW had a major revamp in ~2013, the cell based midranges were replaced by the exandable blade systems and the SD by the SD2. The exandable blades are neat and ain't short of IO Bandwidth. I'm not sure where you get the idea of 90MB/s I saw NFS servers which average over a GB/s back in 2008 and even the entry level test box I picked up of eBay around then was happy to do over 120MB/s from it's internal disks.
- Ken Surplice is most definitely not the HPE Servers EMEA CEO - 5 seconds on google would tell you that.
- "Incredible, it's 2016 and iTanic is still around ... who is buying that, then ?" - People are still buying IBM Mainframes to - apparently people in enterprise IT don't throw everything away every 3 years - who knew?
- "It would be fascinating to know how Itanium applications will run on x86" - HP already have emulation technology called ARIES in HP-UX to let you run old PA-RISC binaries on IA64 - it's not much of a stretch to see some similar technology on Linux/x86 for IA64 binaries
- "HPUX and Itanium, the perfect illustration of how to spend a lot of money buying other companies and then cocking it up." - HP-UX was developed by HP, not bought from another company (although some technology from the Apollo workstation acquisiiton found its way in there, but that was a long time ago). Itanium was conceived in HP and then joint developed with Intel, again not bought in technology. There are other products that HP have bought in and then cocked up, but HP-UX/Itanium isn't one of them
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