HP 3000 customers on the move have heard HP talk up its Adaptive Enterprise for more than two years. This year might be the first when adapting gets easy enough and small enough for the typical 3000 enterprise.

    The changes are rolling out this fall for customers looking at HP-UX as a target environment for their migrations. HP’s Nick van der Zweep, director of virtualization and utility computing, said the new software makes managing virtual environments simpler. It also gives HP-UX customers a way to sample extra horsepower for free.

   “We’re really making virtualization hit the mainstream,” van der Zweep said. The virtualization concept makes IT resources adaptable, so month-end and high-impact processes don’t bottleneck a company’s computing capacity. The Adaptive Enterprise has been an elusive concept in the past, but HP seems to have narrowed the offering down to “synchronizing business and IT,” a way of explaining that heavy computing loads won’t outstrip a company’s IT power.

   A sub-CPU virtualization feature is new, but HP is only letting customers split CPUs for multiple OS instances on its Integrity systems. Three fourths of the BCS server revenues still come from PA-RISC servers such as the HP 9000.

HP has posted a press release on its Virtualization Innovations at its Web site. A set of PDF files with supplemental releases is at an "Interactive Press Kit" link about the announcement