Thursday, October 29, 2009

HP-UX 11i: Mission-critical UNIX

HP was announcing that webcast for weeks, and I decided to check it out. I had seen the one from last year and I didn't find this one much different in terms of presentation or content. The detailed results of the report are here.

First, if I recall correctly the study is done on a sample of around 250 people, give or take, I don't remember the exact number. That's not, in my opinion, a high number. But they insist on the fact that the answers come from data center IT tech staff, not CIOs, which at least comforts me as a systems administrator.

According to the study, UNIX(r) is still alive and well and still a strategic OS, but mostly in the enterprise. I insist on UNIX with capitals and the registered trademark, as they didn't include Linux in that category. They only evaluated AIX, Solaris, and HP-UX which are the "big three" Unixes left. I can resume the presentation to this: HP is better than the rest, sprinkled with numbers from Gabriel Consulting Group and a few slides I've seen countless times previously such as the OE "Christmas present" diagram and the HP-UX roadmap. Cox also spent almost 7 minutes on Green IT, speaking about how HP is "green" and reduces carboard boxes. Interesting, but maybe a bit out of subject. The presentation is high-level, and targeted mostly at people evaluating a migration to HP-UX more than existing customers. No wonder it's on cio.com!

Dan made a smalll mistake during the presentation. He mentioned that Virtualization was a strong point for the HP platform, and he is right. But he then followed on how the tendency would be to virtualize different operating systems on the integrity platform, all the way from Linux, to Windows, to OpenVMS, HP-UX, and then he hesitated and brought up "Tandem", which Brian corrected as "Nonstop OS". Well guys, I don't think they are plans to run Nonstop on HPVM. If there are, I stand corrected!

I couldn't comment if HP is the "best". I haven't worked on multiple platforms in 6 years. But whenI did work with HP-UX, Solaris and AIX, I preferred HP-UX due to its better management feature then. I can only expect it is still even better now.

O.