HP World HP will be a pitching a story of Unix harmony and advancement at its HP World user conference here this week. First up, HP has now released HP-UX 11i V2 for both its Itanium and PA-RISC based servers. This means PA-RISC customers no longer have to wait until HP-UX 11i V3 arrives to use the same operating system as their Itanium counterparts. The bad news, however, is that both sets of customers will have to wait until the second half of next year to get their hands on V3 – a product once due at the end of this year.
I have seen HP’s harware roadmap migrating from PA-RISC to Itanium. Its nice to see the OS roadmap to go with it. SUN take note on how to win consumer confidence.
I can’t help thinking that Sun promising to continue working with Solaris and SPARC is a lot better for customer confidence than HP laying out the intricate plan for how your platform of choice will be thrown into obsolence piece by piece.
Well i promise that you will still have a job working on SUN hardware/software a year from now. I promise you won’t get laid off. Good intentions do not compete with well thought out business plans.
It all depends upon where you are. There’s lots of military stuff, especially Navy and Coast Guard, that runs on HockeyPux, and probably will for a long time. I haven’t seen many other places that run it, though. It’s like any other proprietary non-x86 unix — the market will be around for a long time, although it’s not going to grow much.
On x86, you have the issue of being able to move OS’s pretty easily via binary emulation. (e.g. OpenServer to FreeBSD, soon Linux to Solaris, etc. etc.)
soon Linux to Solaris, etc. etc.)
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ya sure. i really want to do that
> soon Linux to Solaris, etc. etc.)
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> ya sure. i really want to do that
Sure, with all the new features coming up in Solaris 10 it is a no brainer decision. With Solaris costing less Linux and being able to offer more than Linux in terms of features and performance, I don’t think there is much to think about. Plus you even get to run the same Linux binaries on Solaris unmodified.
HP having obsolence roadmaps is hardly worth more than having a promise to stick to the same core technologies they have stuck with for the last 15 years, compare to HP who are working on obsoleting at least the following:
* FOCUS (32-bit architecture predating the PA-RISC)
* PA-RISC
* Alpha
* MPE/iX (old OS)
* Tru64
Both Sun and HP have moved off the 68k at one point. The shift of SunOS from BSD to SysV is an interesting point but it was a well planned migration causing a minimum of fuss for most users.
Not only have Sun stuck by the SPARC for 19 years, they have also made it an open standard so there are several implementations available (the Sun and Fujitsu ones being the two major ones) so the risk of it becoming obsolete anytime soon is minimal.
I would also like to mention that I typed this on an old HP Visualize C200 running HP-UX 11i
It is really a pity that HP basically killed PA-RISC and Alpha despite their rather stellar fp performance and solid foot hold in academic/scientific/engineering segments just to give way to flacid Itanic. True64 was also doing well in HPC segments with probably best clustering implementation out of all Unix OS’s. It is really sad to see them go, thanks a lot Carly — Sun deserves to steal your customers (at least Sun’s products have future)!
unix? what’s that? some sort of linux clone? oh… maybe its one of those *BSD flavors i’m always hearing about. well best of luck to them!
sorry… i can’t help but think of the following article everytime someone mentions unix:
http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=04/05/12/1327217
“It is really a pity that HP basically killed PA-RISC and Alpha despite their rather stellar fp performance and solid foot hold in academic/scientific/engineering segments just to give way to flacid Itanic.”
I will truly miss PA-RISC and Alpha two awesome processor architectures but Itanium is hardly flacid. HP has bet the farm on Itanium and despite a shaky start i doubt HP will let Itanium fail. Itanium2 looks to be a good performer and a worthy sucessor to PA-RISC.
as much as I like Linux, it just can’t scale as well as Solaris and do the things Solaris 9 (and 10) can do. if you want to run a big data center, Solaris is by far your best choice. I like Linux; it’ll get there someday.
“It is really a pity that HP basically killed PA-RISC and Alpha despite their rather stellar fp performance and solid foot hold in academic/scientific/engineering segments just to give way to flacid Itanic.”
I will truly miss PA-RISC and Alpha two awesome processor architectures but Itanium is hardly flacid. HP has bet the farm on Itanium and despite a shaky start i doubt HP will let Itanium fail. Itanium2 looks to be a good performer and a worthy sucessor to PA-RISC.
Have you seen the price of these Itanium machines? the workstations? why on earth would a person want to invest money into an over priced Itanium workstation or server, which has next to no software vendors? and as for the price, good lord, Itanium was meant to be the SUN/IBM/HP UNIX killer, the only result has been is Opteron taking centre stage and Itanium getting a battering in the process.