Submitted by Sun Microsystems is trying to persuade Hewlett-Packard to move its HP-UX Unix customers over to Sun’s Solaris, Sun President/COO Jonathan Schwartz said at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday. But HP is not interested, an HP representative said. During his presentation at the conference and in a subsequent interview, Schwartz said Sun has proposed merging the road maps of HP-UX and Solaris. And on a related note, HP will offer complete SUSE Linux server packages.
I have worked with both HP/UX and Solaris for a long time. There are things I like about both (moreso on the Solaris side). It would be great to see a combo of the two.
With Unix losing some marketshare to Linux recently, it would seem to make sense for Unix providers to collaborate if they intend to retain marketshare for Unix. This is where Sun and HP seem to diverge. Sun is pushing Solaris as a Linux alternative (a solid Unix system in its own right that also has a low-cost license). HP doesn’t need a Linux alternative because they have Linux (through Novell).
I don’t see HP pushing Linux over Unix, but they seem confident in the merits of their own product enough to feel like they don’t need any cooperation from Sun.
I would love to see these two products combined into one stronger product, but I think differing market strategies are what will keep it from happening.
>With Unix losing some marketshare to Linux recently
Actually, funny enough this isn’t true.. UNIX is actually still growing, its just growing slower than Linux and Windows.
What are the strengths of the different UNIXes available today?
Solaris –> Very “linux like”. Supports native linux binaries thanks to a new emulator released by sun. The current version is Open Source under the CCDL license (non-gpl compatible). Sun wrote java so it is extremely fast. DTrace is very very cool if you are willing to learn it:
http://opensolaris.org/os/community/os_user_groups/frosug/dtrace/
Hardware: Sparc/x86 mainly
HP-UX –> Has (in my opinion) the best performance monitoring tools. glance plus is like top + lsof on crack with a decent gui/tui and reporting capabilities. Perfview (performance viewer) also kicks the crap out of other Unix/Linux tools like sar or dstat. Cons: The java virtual machine (made by sun) runs much slower than on solaris. Hardware: PA-RISC, any more?
AIX –> Runs the greatest number of super computers of any Unix in the world. This is a fact from http://www.top500.org. Uses the c shell by default (yuck!) AIX has the best virtualization features of any of the ‘nix platforms and was one of the first to have it. Hardware: Power (similar to mac)
Those are the “Big 3” unix distributions. There are a million more that I’d rather not get into. This information is from my personal experience.
So Solaris’ strengths are Java performance and compatibility with free Linux, HP-UX has some cool monitoring tools, and AIX scales?
HP seriously dropped the ball on HP-UX, compared with Solaris 10 HP-UX is looking seriously dusty. If this is the way HP-UX will go, then in just a few years no-one will care about HP-UX anyway and HP will be forced to transition to some other version Unix and Solaris would fit the bill. Linux won’t be able to replace HP-UX and I hope HP realizes that — Linux does not have the same enterprise platform cred as Solaris or HP-UX and I don’t see it changing any time soon.
I’ve worked a lot with both HP-UX and Solaris. I agree that they both have interesting features, and if the best of both could be merged, it would certainly be a fantastic thing. HP-UX has a few truly pleasant and powerful features (the HP-SD to name one). But given the choice between HP.UX and Solaris, I’d go Solaris any day.
This is where I agree with that other post: HP-UX really does look dated compared to Solaris 10. With a fantastic (probably the best server) kernel, a faster new TCP/IP stack rewritten from scratch, ZONES, DTrace etc. (and let’s not forget Solaris Volume Manager that comes free with Solaris, and is pretty powerful) etc., Solaris is HP-UXs daddy.
P.S. Yes, I know HP-UX has LVM, but LVM costs lotsa money for even RAID 0 (not to speak of all other features), while SVM is completely free, and in some respects is more advanced than LVM.
Edited 2006-02-15 23:23
Sun is trying to woo HP away from HP-UX and move to Solaris. Seriously people, this is like Nike telling Reebok to drop their branding and switch to Nike, it just won’t happen.
HP-UX is a really solid environment and the HP Performance monitoring tools (Perfview, GlancePlus) kick the crap out of anything Solaris has. I know, DTRace is really cool, but do I want to essentially learn a new programming language (DTrace) just to write DTrace scripts? Not really.
This is ridiculous that Sun would do something like this
1) Babe, look how long it took for HP-UX to become 64bit; couple that with the cut-cut-cut when it comes to spending on HP technologies, more specifically HP-UX; HP-UX is falling further and further behind the eighth ball.
2) Stop spreading lies – you don’t need to write anything in D if you don’t want to – want a specific tool, download a pre-written script and use that; the D language is *ONLY* there if you need to *EXPLICITLY* want something that is so far out of the normal requirements, you have to actually specify exactly what you want.
3) People boo-hoo’ed the idea that HP might end up supporting Solaris on their x86 machines, and guess what, they now do that – same goes for IBM.
The code for Itanium support is already THERE at SUN, along with the support for Itanium in the SUN compilers (when SUN was porting Solaris to Itanium) – nothing stopping HP from embracing OpenSolaris, porting it to Itanium and rebranding it as HP-UX 12, and selling support and middleware ontop of it.
They would have a unique branded product based on the collective pool of resources that come with using OpenSolaris – personally, one would be MAD to continue to flog the dead horse that is HP-UX when a superior product like Solaris is sitting out there that can be embraced, changed and re-branded as an HP product.
Let’s see if I get this straight.
Sun has cleared up it’s act and is finally looking promising again thanks to it’s Unix efforts.
SGI is down the drain, thanks to Linux.
Novell shows red numbers and is no doubt going down the drain, thanks to Linux.
Palm is about to join the 2 above with the same problem
And now HP suddenly makes this brilliant move? What is it I’m missing? What’s next? Microsoft aiming for the drain?
This is simply amazing… and people complained about Enron
SGI is down the drain, thanks to Linux.
What a load of BS. I would love to see how you came to that conclusion and how you didn’t even account for their complete change of clients and architecture. Switching to Linux was the least of the changes that went on at SGI. IRIX wouldn’t have survived their switch to super computers anyway.
Novell shows red numbers and is no doubt going down the drain, thanks to Linux.
That’s funny because as I remember it Novell wasn’t doing so hot before they acquired SuSE and Ximian. It hasn’t been a very long time since that happened. Change doesn’t happen over night and with the looks of NLD 10 Novell finally has something to offer on the desktop that people will want.