HP-UX gains its seventh generation of improvements this month with the 11i v3 Update 7 release, which adds a range of enhancements to save time administering and integrating the OS with Oracle, among other technologies. HP's enterprise-grade alternative environment to MPE/iX has been already been updated for more than three years, and HP will carry the v3 banner well into 2014 according to its roadmaps.

HP and Oracle kissed and made up at last month's Oracle World conference in San Francisco -- held after Larry Ellison had scorched HP about firing Mark Hurd, then hired the ex-CEO to run the Oracle sales and marketing force as a co-president. HP filed a lawsuit and then settled, but there's another one between Oracle and SAP over copyright infringement -- which Oracle says took place during former SAP exec Leo Apotheker's watch. Ellison recently chided HP about hiring Apotheker, wondering "what ever happened to the HP Way?"

The improvements to HP-UX which hug the OS tighter to Ellison's Oracle were in development long before the current dust ups, of course.

The combination of HP-UX and Oracle's E-Business Suite is now promised to cost 93 percent less in dollars and time when the Oracle solution is clustered with 11i v3. Oracle's EBS stack of over 200 applications can be online in two days instead of the previous 30, HP says, and the cluster administrator can eliminate up to 12 hours of planned downtime a month.

Then there's better database manageability with "zero custom coding for Oracle Data Guard," a feature to enhance availability or disaster recovery for Data Guard. HP's competitor in Unix systems sales is its strongest partner in selling Oracle databases, and Data Guard maintains secondary standby databases as supplementary repositories to production databases.

Availability is such a crucial element in choosing Oracle and HP-UX that HP now boasts it's "90 percent faster to start up key applications after a failover."