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Too many Unixes? HP plans to support HP-UX and Tru64 and OpenUnix and ...
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CommentsIt's not an easy job, but Hewlett-Packard is determined to support no fewer than five major operating systems: Linux, HP-UX, Tru64, OpenVMS and Windows. Dig a bit deeper and it's even more complicated with three main flavors of Linux -- Debian, Red Hat, and UnitedLinux -- and at least as many versions of Windows -- Windows 2000, XP and the up coming .NET Server.
How will the company manage to support them? Good question. Dan Kusnetzky, IDC's vice president of system software research, isn't sure HP can pull it off.
Kusnetzky says, "They have two world class Unix offerings with different levels of strength in two areas. Both are the products of at least one decade, if not two, of hard work to enhance them in different ways." And, they've gone in different directions. For example, both HP-UX and Tru64 "have strong clustering enhancements but there are two ways to approach clustering, and HP-UX has taken the share nothing road, while DEC/Compaq with Tru64 took the shared everything route."
On one level, he continues, "they can't afford to keep both, but the installed base has said that if they kill our Unix we'll walk away." And, he adds, it hard to walk away from HP-UX with its 12% of shipping Unix or Tru64 with its 4%."
Mike Wardley, HP-UX marketing manager, agrees and says that's why HP isn't walking from either. Instead, Wardley explains, "what we're trying to do is to deliver on all of HP and Compaq's OS promises made prior to the Compaq merger all the way out to 2005. Ultimately, HP-UX will be our Unix offering and at some stage Tru64 will go away." But, even then, Wardley adds, "while the last set of enhancements to Tru64 will be made in 2004/2005 we plan on supporting it out to 2011." Why? "Because that's what our customers want and we have a very customer-centric approach."
He may be right to take that approach. In talking with three Tru64 Unix administrators not a one of them would consider switching over to HP- UX today. As loyal as any Linux fan to his favorite distribution, these administrators simply won't walk away from their mainstay operating system.
Kusnetzky adds: "HP has a wonderful plan, but from a financial analyst viewpoint, you're saying that you're going to manage to keep both of them. They can say that they plan to do it, but which one will get the funding when the finances are cut? Will they support two badly or let one slide?" He expects that "Tru64 revenue stream will be smaller and HP will put money where the market is. That translates into money to HP-UX."
While both systems will get full support, new changes are in both systems' future. Beginning in 2003, HP will start migrating Tru64 features to HP-UX. By 2004, TruCluster is supposed to be running on HP-UX and a complete migration tool set for moving from Tru64 to HP- UX should be in place.
At the same time, HP plans on moving Tru64 from the ever-so-dying Alpha chip family to Intel's Itanium 2 processors. This will give die- hard Tru64 users a hardware platform to operate from even as time slowly brings the curtain down on aging Alpha servers. Even so, HP executives think most Tru64 customers will still wait until 2007 to move. HP is doing its best to insure that the move is to HP-UX 11i v3 and not, say, .NET Server or IBM's AIX.
At the same time, both operating systems will be getting Linux affinities to enable administrators to compile and run Linux- compatible source code. Eventually, by 2005, HP-UX will be able to run Linux binaries.
This is part of a broader trend, which Kusnetzky likes to call the real unification of Unix to Linux. Wardley agrees to an extent, but while any Linux application will eventually run on HP-UX, he still sees a place for HP-UX.
According to Wardley, "Linux will take over file/print world period, and Microsoft may be the losers to Linux." But without the fancy features of high-end enterprise computing such as self-tuning, Linux will stay separate from HP-UX, he predicts. He foresees HP-UX on the high-end with Linux on the low end and edge servers.
And what about OpenVMS? Mike Balma, Linux business strategist for HP, says, "OpenVMS will also be moved over to Itanium 2 and that will extend VMS' life until at least 2006." It may be longer. HP is continuing to push OpenVMS 7.3-1 with new minor releases throughout the rest of year and beyond for both the Alpha and VMS platforms.
Still, while it may be hard for HP to support so many systems, as Kusnetzky says, "it's a grand plan, and it will be wonderful if they can do it, but I'm not sure the reality of budgets will make it impossible for them to do it all." That said, HP is determined to try.
Comments
on Too many Unixes? HP plans to support HP-UX and Tru64 and OpenUnix and ...Note: Comments are owned by the poster. We are not responsible for their content.
SE
a) RH has more users than Mandrake, much more
b) Debian is older and<nobr> <wbr></nobr>... has more users
c) UL has the potentioal to become big as they havent released ther distro yet, just because of its 4 creators.
So I think he's right, even if I'm using Gentoo and think it rocks all of those others, I dont laugh at the 3 big ones.
SE
Personally, I run and developer Debian GNU/{Hurd, Linux}, and I don't see Gentoo becoming 'mainstream'. I think it will go onto some servers and desktops, but I think it is more apt to take a few developers away from Debian and some users from slackware, not a whole lot more.
Linux is an equalizer. It allows people to write apps that will run on ANY hardware. Mainframe, PDA, desktop PC - doesn't matter. It makes almost all hardware a commodity. The days of proprietary UNIX is numbered. Why should a software vendor support goofy versions of UNIX that are locked to a single vendor's hardware? Talk about massivly increased cost of support.
Wardley is living in deamland if he thinks that people are going to migrate from tru64 to hpux. Not only are tru64 users losing their OS, they are losing the entire architecture. Since they have to switch anyway, they might as well move to Linux. Maybe not NOW, but by the year 2007 or 2011 (dates from the article) Linux will be more than a match for ANY proprietary flavor of Linux.
Linux has legs, you see. It's evolving rapidly. It's getting global attention, support, development, etc. EVERY major hardware manufacture (IBM, HP, Sun, SGI, Dell) supports Linux. Hpux is only supported by, well, HP. HP, the company that just layed off thousands of people. HP, the company that killed many customers OS of choice (that would be tru64 for those not paying attention.:-)
If YOU were a tru64 customer, wouldn't you be concerned that HP will kill HPUX sometime in the future too? I know I would.
The writting is on the wall, and has been for quite some time. I'll make a prediction: Not ONE proprietary flavor of UNIX will still be in active developement by the year 2011. It will be maintenance mode only. By 2015, Nobody will sell a new box with a proprietary flavor of UNIX.
Linux only on the low end? Pah. File and Print? Pah. The guy obviosuly knows NOTHING about Linux, and hasn't read a trade journal in the last 3 years. No wonder Bruce left. People like Wardley have such closed minds that Bruce was wasting his breath.
At best, they'll come out with flavors of Linux optimized for their hardware, like Sun seems to be planning to do. Or they may follow a migration patch along the line of their existing Unix flavor, like I suspect IBM may be doing with AIX 5L being the first version of this new move. Or, most likely, a mix of both.
However, the migration away from the proprietary Unixes will be slow because there is a strong core of battle-weary veterans who have invested their body and soul into their OS flavor and aren't even considering moving over for some upstart, 10-year old little stripling. And they'll fight back hard. They won't upgrade. Since Unix isn't like Windows, you can hang out comfortably with an old version until they drag your carcass out the door.
I'd probably add one holdout to the group and that's QNX.
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,104016,<nobr>0<wbr></nobr> 0.asp
We'll have to see what happens.
The key here is whether such people will retain influence in organisations like HP, IBM, Sun and the like. And also whether such organisations feel that high notables like Bruce are needed to add credibility and weight to their Linux offerings ie. Linux is important to them, not just a marketing-speak tool.
That is the important fact, I feel.
Rgds
Andy
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(1) I got this from linux.org (http://www.linux.org/news/index.html)
The relevant article quoted in Linux.org was
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/08/15<nobr>/<wbr></nobr> 020815hnperenshp.xml
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Steven
But your right, across their entire line of hardware, if you run Solaris 8 (for example) on all you machines, things work.
Solaris x86 is a JOKE. NOBODY supports it (third party vendors.) It's hardware compatibility is horrible - basically nothing more recent than 2 - 3 year old hardware is supported, and only MAJOR brand stuff. It's not really Sun's fault, just facts of the market. No hardare mfr is going to bother supporting an OS that nobody uses and that no apps are available for. Internally at Sun, x86 is shunned. don't believe me? Try getting a bug fixed. Nobody cares. I had a nasty (easily repeatable) NFS bug that I had an outstanding sev 1 report on for over a year. We finally switched all 90 boxes to Linux and never looked back (big performance boost too.)
1) continue to market it.
2) jilt a huge customer base
>the ever-so-dying Alpha chip family to Intel's
>Itanium 2 processors.
OpenUNIX in the title and then OpenVMS mentioned in first sentence? As has already been mentioned, OpenVMS is not UNIX.
Tru64 UNIX is not being ported to IPF.
As far as other comments made to this article relating to Linux taking over...she's got a long way to go to compete with SuperDome and Wildfire. Linux is just not ready for the large enterprise, yet. Too many issues still remain for it to be considered seriously. SMP multi-processor scaling, CPU failover, hotswap, clustering, and other enterprise class problems still need to be addressed. Not to say these problems won't eventually, probably sooner than later, be overcome. I'm not even mentioning Linux competeing with OpenVMS, talk about solid and secure as a rock. Linux doesn't even approach this kind of reliability.
Just a suggestion, next time talk to someone in the OpenVMS group for questions on OpenVMS instead of the HP Linux strategy group. You'll probably get better information.
--
Kenneth Farmer
http://www.Tru64.org
http://www.OpenVMS.org
http://www.LinuxHPC.org
HP & Mandrake & UnitedLinux
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on August 19, 2002 09:28 PMBy the way, when you write that the main flavours of Linux are Debian, Red Hat and... UnitedLinux, that makes me laugh!
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