The numbers in the Unix market may be flat, but Hewlett-Packard sees a bright future for its HP-UX operating system. The company this fall will release HP-UX 11i v3 – the first major revamp of the OS in three years – with enhancements in its virtualization and automation capabilities, according to Don Jenkins, vice president of HP’s Business Critical Servers unit.
This article proves emphatically that there is still big business for big iron Unix – Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX. Linux is becoming dominant in small to medium sized servers, and in server farms, and as a web server, and is taking hold as a workstation/desktop, and is big in the embedded/pda/cell phone market. But the the really big, tera-byte handling, always up, super servers are mostly powered by the big proprietary unices.
In other words, Linux is really good at a lot of things, but probably not the very best for any one given thing. A great example is big iorn servers, which really benefit from the advanced features, performance, reliability, and the time/market proven big unices – Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX.
Another funny thing of note – Sun last year was mouthing off (as usual) about how HP-UX was dead, and Solaris was kicking booty. Well, obviously they were wrong about that.
true, when you think big iron, you generally will think solaris, aix, etc. but alot of places are moving away from that mold, to instead using large clusters of smaller, cheaper, and often faster linux servers (cheap dells come to mind)
“alot of places are moving away from that mold, to instead using large clusters of smaller, cheaper, and often faster linux servers (cheap dells come to mind)”
There are some high-profile examples of companies opting for this kind of computing strategy, but you must keep in mind that these are young, rapidly-growing companies with large investments in elite, in-house developers and sysadmins for supporting their cluster infrastructure. Google is of course the prototypical example.
However, mature corporations with existing infrastructure and smaller, less technical businesses would be better served sticking with enterprise-class servers. The definition of “enterprise-class server” is becoming less exotic, now including 2- and 4-way Opteron servers on the low-end, and such machines are very cost-effective relative to multinode clusters of cheap and unreliable beige-box PCs–once you figure in the full-time staff to administer the cluster.
Another increasinly popular option is to combine the manageability of an enterprise-class server with the redundancy of a cluster to form a multinode/multiprocessing cluster with failover and fault recovery features.
Wouldn’t actually say they were “obviously wrong”, here’s some current info on server shipments:
On the revenue front, Sun made by far the most significant gains. Sun’s server revenue surged 8 per cent, while HP was flat. IBM saw revenue slide 4 per cent, and Dell posted a 2 per cent drop in revenue. Fujistu stumbled in a big way, dropping 14 per cent.
“Sun Microsystems returned to server revenue growth for the first time in almost two years, driven by increases in its UltraSPARC and its Opteron-based server revenue,” Gartner said. “Dell, on the other hand, while posting a 7.1 percent shipment growth for the quarter, suffered an atypical revenue drop of 2 percent for the period.”
Sun regained its position as the big-iron leader, as it grew sales, while HP, IBM and Fujitsu dropped sales. Sun now accounts for more than 50 per cent of Unix/Itanium shipments and 32 per cent of big-iron revenue. HP and IBM follow with 30 per cent revenue share each.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/24/firstq_gart_server/
Well yea, at the time, it was a pretty good bet to say that HP-UX was dead. What, with Princess Fiorina killing off almost all inovation at HP, and then Hurd coming in, whose intentions seemed to rest squarely on downsizing, I would have put good money on the demise of HP-UX. It’s good to see that HP might have a few surprizes up it’s sleeve still, and it’s also good that I didn’t put any money down on that bet. =)
But the the really big, tera-byte handling, always up, super servers are mostly powered by the big proprietary unices.
The reason why is that a lot of the systems these things run are so critical that they simply cannot be replaced with anything else. There are still thousands, upon thousands, upon thousands of Unix systems out there that need to be supported, updated and kept ticking over.
There may not be a lot of new shipments, but yes, Unix is far, far, far from dead because it’s still out there in huge numbers. This ‘low hanging fruit’ of Unix servers that Linux companies come up with is pure BS as far as I’m concerned.
I thought they were axing HP-UX
…how does that saying go about beating a dead horse….
on a side note with HP’s aquisition of compaq they got OpenVMS. why not frankly just use OpenVMS. thye offer 2 things that do very similar tasks. it is baffeling to me
Edited 2006-05-25 21:06
Probably because Unix sysadmins are a LOT cheaper and easier to find than VMS sysadmins.
I would also think that it would take a great deal of money and effort getting OpenVMS to run as well as it does on alpha, on the x86 front. OpenVMS is a fantastic, rock solid OS. At my work, we run our main product on it. It’s just not the first thing I think of when I think opteron or xeon. It shouldn’t be all that hard to get HP-UX running on x86 machines, and that’s where I think their main push will be with this (with the alpha being dead and all, and the Itanic tanking).
Alpha is only dead because HP murdered it.. :'(
And it looks like VMS will die will it. Which is sucks. VMS is a great OS. Alot of the ‘cutting edge’ clustering stuff that Unix recently got or is getting, VMS HAD since the 80’s..
They should push Tru64.
if HP want their HPUX to get exposure to a large number of testers, developers, tinkerers, students, entrepreneurs … they should make a version free (or open even) for x86.
The pattern we’re seeing with Solaris is that people are testing, learning and developing for the OS on cheap consumer-class hardware – with production being fine tuned on server-end sparc or opteron hardware.
this will only work if the free OS is equivalent functionally to the premium version – and you can largely say this is true for solaris 10/11.
They should open source Tru64 instead of just letting it die.
So it would be good if HP would start shipping a HP-UX option on their laptops. There’s still no easy way to buy a laptop running unix (except for macintosh where the user environment is very alien to those of us who like traditional unix workstation setups – only crappy workspace suppt through third party apps, less configurability, candy overdose, etc). Certainly there’s no easy way to get System V on a laptop.
AFAIK HP-UX only runs on PA-RISC and Itanium CPUs, so much for laptop support I’m afraid.
If you really want System V on a laptop, you’re best off with Solaris, but check the HCL before you plunge.
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/data/sol/systems/views/all_laptops_…
VMware also isn’t a bad way to run Solaris 10 x86 either, both routes have worked for me.
Actually, Sun has a line of ultrasparc laptops with solaris already on em. Check em out:
http://www.sun.com/desktop/workstation/ultra3/index.xml
I agree!!! Cheap itanium laptops or desktops are ideal for pushing HPUX. This is what I was discussing with an HP engineer and he agreed. But he could not understand why his company is pushing crappy windows.
So it would be good if HP would start shipping a HP-UX option on their laptops. There’s still no easy way to buy a laptop running unix
That was the problem about sixteen years ago, and that’s why Linux came into being.
> That was the problem about sixteen years ago, and
> that’s why Linux came into being.
Linux wasn’t created with laptops in mind and certainly isn’t filling the void in 2006.
The friendly-hardware list at the fsf is tiny. Even if you’re prepared to have non-free code in your kernel there’s plenty of dicey stuff. Wireless drivers, external monitor support, modems, soundcards – these things tend to be either painful or unachievable in laptops. None of those are minor details.
The one exception to my unix on a laptop comment is mac os x, and I dealt with that and why it’s not the same as what I’m after in the sentence after the one you’ve quoted.
Linux wasn’t created with laptops in mind and certainly isn’t filling the void in 2006.
And the various Unixes are? That’s news to a lot of people. If you want to see Unix on a laptop, try running Solaris or HP-UX – if you can.
The friendly-hardware list at the fsf is tiny.
What’s that got to do with Linux?
Even if you’re prepared to have non-free code in your kernel there’s plenty of dicey stuff. Wireless drivers, external monitor support, modems, soundcards – these things tend to be either painful or unachievable in laptops. None of those are minor details.
Many distributions seem to handle it fine, although the breadth of stuff like sound card support in the kernel is huge. The point is, this kind of support is absolutely non-existant in a any Unix system, if you think Linux is bad.
The one exception to my unix on a laptop comment is mac os x
Mac OS isn’t the solid Unix environment that Apple pretends that it is, and lacks many things that a ‘Unix’-like system should have in favour of a proprietary user interface and system that works in an entirely different way.
And the various Unixes are? That’s news to a lot of people. If you want to see Unix on a laptop, try running Solaris or HP-UX – if you can.
Or perhaps FreeBSD.Which has better hardware support and is way easier to manage.
> And the various Unixes are?
No, the various unixes are not, hence the reason for my original post. “There’s still no easy way to buy a laptop running unix”. Duh.
> Many distributions seem to handle it fine, although
> the breadth of stuff like sound card support in the
> kernel is huge. The point is, this kind of support is
> absolutely non-existant in a any Unix system, if you
> think Linux is bad.
I know. And that’s why my original post was asking, “So it would be good if HP would start shipping a HP-UX option on their laptops.”
> Mac OS isn’t the solid Unix environment that Apple
> pretends that it is, and lacks many things that a
> ‘Unix’-like system should have in favour of a
> proprietary user interface and system that works in
> an entirely different way.
I haven’t had any stability problems with the xserve we use for one of our products (remotely managed). However, it’s a pain to do basic stuff like configure users from the command-line, etc. In fact I agree with most of what you say in this bit. It’s annoying that you can’t switch off the aqua frontend altogether and login to a pure x session. Even a simple console that worked properly would be a good start. I just can’t get vim to play nicely under the console on my ibook, running tiger.
.