HP shifts focus for HP-UX

Hewlett-Packard has dropped plans to beef up its HP-UX operating system with new high availability and clustering technology it obtained in its 2002 acquisition of Compaq Computer. The company will instead shift its development focus to new areas, as it attempts to convince customers that there is still life in its venerable Unix operating system.

HP expected to deliver these two major features, derived from Compaq’s Tru64 operating system, in a 2006 release of HP-UX 11i Version 3. With the decision to abandon the work, however, customers will actually get the features more quickly, thanks to a partnership with Veritas Software. The two companies are now planning to ship HP’s Serviceguard high-availability software bundled with the Veritas Storage Foundation suite in the third quarter of 2005.

As a result, the development strategy for upcoming HP-UX releases will be to improve the operating system’s performance and virtualization capabilities, said Rich Marcello, senior vice president and general manager of HP’s business critical servers group.

HP has some catch-up work to do in the virtualization area, where rival IBM’s AIX version of Unix is already capable of running as many as 10 instances of an operating system on a single processor. HP will have similar features as part of its Integrity Virtual Machines software, which is expected in the second half of 2005.

“What this is doing is allowing us to focus on HP-UX in a way that we can really truly differentiate,” Marcello said of the decision to partner with Veritas. “The world is moving toward virtualization, ... and we wanted to enhance our overall virtualization story.”

Although the long delayed Version 3 release of HP-UX has not been moved up as a result of the decision to abandon Tru64 integration, Marcello said HP’s Unix developers are shifting their efforts to “hard-core performance threading.”

HP’s focus on performance is aimed at wooing customers such as Jerry Skaare, director of architecture at Best Western. A former Tru64 user who has migrated to HP-UX to run the hotel chain’s reservation system, Skaare will take a hard look at performance as his company prepares for its next IT deployments.

“Since per-processor software licensing for Oracle and other proprietary software dwarfs processor acquisition and maintenance costs, the manufacturer that gets more work done on a per-processor basis is going to get the face time with people in my situation right now,” Skaare said.

Customers such as Skaare, who says he has been left confused by the HP-UX road map, may now look at Unix from either IBM or Sun Microsystems. But HP-UX users will be offered “comparable or better” software with the Veritas bundles, he said.

Privately, some at HP believe the company’s long-term priorities will remain with the Linux and Windows operating systems, and the decision to hand over the high availability and file system development to Veritas could be seen as part of an ongoing movement away from HP-UX.

“If we look at the operating systems market, the areas of significant growth are Windows and Linux,” said Dan Kusnetzky, an analyst at IDC. “My sense is that HP, along with the other hardware suppliers, is looking at that trend and trying to maintain their bias toward the growing markets.”