HP Integrity servers get virtual

Hewlett-Packard is putting the finishing touches on a new release of its Unix OS, which will deliver a long-awaited virtualization capability to the company’s Integrity line of servers. The update will be available by the beginning of July as a patch release to the company’s HP-UX 11iv2 OS.

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The virtualization technology, called Virtual Partitions, or vPars, allows users to install more than one copy of HP-UX on a computer. HP has included this feature in its HP 9000 line of Unix servers for years, but this release will mark the first time it has been made available for Integrity, which uses Intel’s Itanium 2 processor.

“VPars will be shipping in several weeks,” said Mary Ellen Lewandowski, director of Unix product marketing at HP.

To date, the older HP 9000 line has had a richer set of features than Integrity, but HP has been working to narrow that gap. At the end of 2004 the company released the first version of HP-UX identical for both HP 9000 and Integrity servers. But because that release did not support vPars, many HP 9000 users avoided the new software.

Customers have been wondering when HP would ship this upcoming release since the company’s annual user conference in August of last year, said Steven Protter, a Chicago-based HP-UX consultant. “The biggest question that came up in HP World 2004 was, ‘When is vPars support going to happen?’” he said. “It’s good that they’re keeping their promise.”

By enabling vPars for Integrity, HP is delivering a “sorely needed” capability to the server line, but the company still lags behind its rivals, said Tony Iams, a senior analyst at Ideas International, an industry research firm based in Port Chester, N.Y.

To address this gap, HP is developing a more powerful virtualization technology, called Virtual Machine, which is expected to ship by the end of the year.

“That Virtual Machine technology is going to let them have an answer to Sun and IBM,” Iams said. “That is going to give them much more flexibility than vPars.”

Though sales of the Itanium-based systems have not lived up to initial expectations, they are now the fastest-growing component of HP’s enterprise product line. And this week HP is set to release the first of its NonStop fault-tolerant servers based on the Intel processor. Called the Integrity NonStop, the server, available in July, will be capable of running one copy of its OS on as many as 4,080 processors.

HP is also working hard to add Veritas’s clustering and advanced file-system capabilities to HP-UX. That work is just months away from being released, according to Lewandowski. “We will be bringing it out around August, September, or maybe a week or two into October,” she said.

In 2006, HP plans to ship HP-UX 11iv3, which will feature a rewritten I/O stack and enhanced virtualization and partition management, Lewandowski said.