At its annual Hewlett-Packard World user conference in
Chicago this week, HP will announce a number of enhancements to its
HP-UX operating system, designed to narrow the gap between the
capabilities of the company's Integrity and HP9000
servers.
The company is also developing enhancements to the Virtual
Server Environment software it ships with its HP-UX Unix operating
system that will bring a number of the virtualisation features only
available on HP-UX to the Linux and Windows servers in HP's Itanium
2-based Integrity product line.
With the Unix upgrade, expected in October, HP will for the
first time ship the same version of HP-UX on both its Integrity and
its PA-Risc-based HP 9000 hardware lines, said Mary Ellen
Lewandowski, Unix marketing manager with HP.
"Our original plan had been to have (HP-UX 11i) v3 be the common
release, but there was such an interest in having this capability
sooner that we brought it in and are delivering it," she said.
HP has been under pressure to unify its two versions of HP-UX to
ease the transition from the PA-Risc architecture, which HP has
said it will stop developing in 2005, to systems based on Intel's
Itanium chips.
Although HP said it is pleased with the rate its customers are
moving to Integrity, this migration has been hampered by a lack of
feature parity between the two platforms.
"Getting to a kind of unification or parity between the
historical PA platforms and the Integrity Itanium platforms is very
important," said Jonathan Eunice, an analyst with Illuminata.
Once expected to ship by the end of 2004, HP-UX 11i v3 has now
been delayed until 2005, and with Monday's announcement, the
company hopes to reverse any slowdown in Integrity adoption that
this delay may have precipitated, said Eunice.
The enhanced version of HP-UX 11i v2 will include high
availability, cluster management and virtualisation capabilities,
HP said. And for the first time, one copy of HP-UX will support as
many as 128 processors on both HP's Integrity and PA-Risc
systems.
HP's competitors have taken the company's strategic embrace of
Itanium as an opportunity to poach customers. Last year, Sun
launched an "HP Away" customer migration program, aimed at
snatching £27m a year in business from the Alphaserver customer
base HP acquired through its 2002 merger with Compaq.
The program was expanded to target HP's PA-Risc servers earlier
this year, and has brought in about £108m in revenue during its
first year, Sun said.
"If you are an enterprise customer using HP-UX systems, the
merger was not good for you," said Larry Singer, Sun's senior
vice-president and strategic insights officer.
On Monday, Sun plans to further expand the HP Away program by
offering migration tools and purchasing incentives designed to
entice customers to buy Sun servers based on the AMD Opteron
processor, Singer said.
But HP is not standing still. It is adding new features to the
Virtual Server Environment software it includes with Integrity and
has plans to port a number of the new VSE features it is developing
for HP-UX systems to Linux and Windows, in an effort to promote
Integrity to a wider set of users.
"We are moving into the multi-operating system phase with
the VSE," said Nick van der Zweep, director of virtualisation and
utility computing at HP.
Over the next year the company will gradually roll out the
multi-OS version of VSE that will let Linux and HP-UX users better
manage and create virtual machines that can then consolidate
applications on a single Integrity server.
With HP's software, administrators can create a number of
virtual machines on a single server, which can then be managed and
configured as if they were separate servers using software called
the Global Workload Manager.
Global Workload Manager, a follow on to the HP-UX Workload
manager, will be available by the year's end, Van der Zweep said.
The company will deliver new Integrity Virtual Machine technology,
comparable to HP-UX's virtual partitions in the second half of
2005, he said.
Though IBM has made some gains with the recent launch of its
Power5 Unix systems, HP still has the edge in terms of
virtualisation technology, Eunice said. "HP, from a product point
of view, is actually the leader. They have been shipping a lot of
the product capabilities for several years now
Robert McMillan writes for the IDG News
Service