HP-UX upgrade hops-up 3PAR links, SAP
September 19, 2011
Why would a migrating shop even consider HP-UX, given that it's got a lifespan limited by the market's interest in Unix? The HP-UX migrator of today is following HP's lead, or they need more enterprise-scale management plus administration that's hard to deploy in Windows and Linux. Simply put, HP-UX is a business-grade OS that's more mature than Windows or Linux.
As HP 3000 customers know, maturity is a double-edged feature. This environment can be better at what a business needs. But it's older and less popular with app providers, not to mention that it runs on exactly one chip: the oft-maligned Itanium powering Integrity servers.
But we've reported enough about the one-bedroom house where Itanium lives. There's the ongoing lawsuit between HP and Oracle, the latter being a pretty key player in most HP Unix shops. Oracle wants out of the Integrity/Itanium bedroom. There's also the Intel view, where Itanium has a future of at least two more major releases, and refutes Oracle's claims of an impending demise.
Aside from all that, we see today's news about the September 2011 release of HP-UX v 11.3. HP has at least adopted a major-release schedule, every six months, to keep its Unix in front of the one from Oracle/Sun, or the biggest competitor in IBM's AIX. It gets a little troublesome to see the HP-UX improvements if you're new to Unix, however. HP's got plenty of technical/marketing details online already. If you know that your corporate parents will push you to Unix, that is. Several of these upgrades will only matter to the large-scale enterprise. But to keep things simple, HP's invoked a reference to an ad which the company once used to tout MPE/iX -- the Energizer bunny.
And HP-UX should be ready, because it's now in its ninth generation and has been on the market for more than four years. Not long in the HP 3000 chronology. It was commonplace to see MPE/iX 6.0 running more than five years after HP rolled it out. But HP wants to remind its HP-UX customers that the software is behaving like a famous advertising animal. Without mentioning the advertiser's name.
Have you ever wondered what the connection is between HP-UX 11i v3 and that famous bunny that just keeps “going and going”? Like the bunny, HP-UX 11i v3 has been “going and going” since 2007 delivering the key software enhancements most needed by our mission-critical customers.
HP's Unix is now integrated with HP 3PAR storage arrays, because what's the point of spending billions to buy a storage company if the newly-acquired products (and their customers) don't slip into your OS seamlessly? It's made possible by Serviceguard Metrocluster and Continentalclusters. The software-hardware combo does "synchronous replication and automated failover for rapid recovery of 3PAR Storage array data, giving you with more disaster recovery options. We’ve also made improvements in SGeSAP to help keep SAP up and running by guarding against failure and downtime of SAP."
Of course, SAP is a frequent corporate target platform to replace HP 3000 apps. So it's a genuine benefit to know HP is guarding better against failure and downtime of SAP.
There's more online about this ninth-gen HP-UX, written in brief by Sam Czertok, the HP-UX Portfolio Product Marketing Manager and now working on his sixth year at HP, after recent stints product-managing HP's netbooks and the HP Slate's software. For genuine meaty technical details (something that your Unix guru will want to study) head to the Quick Specs page on the latest HP Unix.