HP Readies HP-UX 11i v3 For Launch

Published: January 10, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Just as 2006 was winding down, Hewlett-Packard announced some security enhancements to its HP-UX variant of the Unix operating system, which runs on Itanium Integrity servers as well as on older PA-RISC HP 9000 iron. These enhancements, which HP was previewing as upcoming features in the future HP-UX 11i v3, were announced for the current HP-UX 11i v2. The reason HP did this, apparently, is because it did not want these security enhancements buried in the impending HP-UX 11i v3 announcement.

HP is being cagey about exactly when it will deliver HP-UX 11i v3, but according to Mel Lewandowski, director of Unix product marketing, the announcement will come in a matter of several weeks. Late February seems likely, but it could slip to early March.

Many of the enhancements in systems management, server provisioning, security, and virtualization that are coming in HP-UX 11i v3 are ones that have been driven by customer demand and are things that HP has been promising--mostly in private, but sometimes in public--for quite some time.

HP-UX 11i v3 has had a difficult birth. It has been over three years since HP has delivered a new release of its flagship Unix platform, and HP-UX 11i v3 was expected some time in the late fall of 2006 after a number of delays. One set of delays were caused by Intel's own delays with its Itanium chips; another set of delays were caused by HP's attempt to absorb the clustered file system of Compaq's Tru64 Unix into HP-UX--an effort that ultimately failed. HP-UX 11i v3 was originally slated as the unified release of Unix software to run on both PA-RISC and Itanium processors, and it was expected in 2003. Then, it was pushed to 2004. And then in 2005, HP killed off the TruCluster integration project and backcast the virtualization and systems management features of the future HP-UX 11i v3 into 11i v2 while at the same time making 11i v2 it compatible with the Itanium architecture. (HP-UX 11i v2 had already worked on PA-RISC iron, of course.)

To help build confidence in the HP-UX installed base, which numbers some 500,000 installed licenses worldwide according to HP's estimates, the company has begun to talk a little more publicly about the HP-UX roadmap in recent months. (We got some of the scoop on 11i v3 last June, of course.) The latest HP-UX 11i roadmap fleshes out HP's plans a little, but is a bit short on the details.

HP-UX 11i v3 is being positioned as the "next level" of virtualization and automation, providing enhancements to HP-UX 11i v2, which includes Virtual Server Environment partitioning that was a bit too static. (Virtual Server Environment includes nPar hardware partitions and vPar virtual partitions, which were ported from the PA-RISC Superdome platform to all Itanium-based Integrity servers with HP-UX 11i v2.) With 11i v3, provisioning of servers and partitions will be driven by policies, not human administrators with scripts, and systems and partitions will be more dynamic--meaning they can be changed without taking the system offline. Right now, in HP-UX 11i v2, moving a workload from one partition to another requires tweaking dozens of parameters and requires a reboot.

HP-UX 11iv3 will also have a substantially altered I/O subsystem, which has more dynamic multipathing capabilities. By carving up the I/O, that means as workloads move across processors, they can move in concert across the I/O subsystem, which has also been virtualized. And multipathing, which means giving data multiple paths into and out of I/O devices, is also useful for making systems more resilient.

Also important are changes that HP is making to decrease both planned and unplanned downtime on HP-UX systems. This may sound boring in the future press release, but it is exactly what the system administrators and IT managers who run HP-UX shops want to hear. (Exactly what HP is doing to accomplish this is unclear at this point.)

A lot of these changes are not simple, and they require big changes in the HP-UX kernel--which might explain why HP-UX 11i v3 was delayed for so long. "When you rearchitect your kernel, you get a chance to restructure it for short-term and long-term features," explains Lewandowski, and rather than rush HP-UX 11i v3 out the door, this is what the company has apparently done. Considering the high-end database and back office applications that HP-UX typically runs--unlike Solaris, HP-UX was not used very much for infrastructure workloads, where companies have redundancy in the network--HP's Unix customer base is probably just as happy to wait for all the kernel changes to be working well in concert.

On the security front, which HP was talking about in lieu of the 11i v3 launch at the end of December, HP has launched its promised encryption for disk volumes and file systems, naming it the Encrypted Volume and File System. This feature encrypts data before it actually ends up on the RAID arrays or Fibre Channel-based storage area networks; the encryption is done at the operating system level and, presumably, by the processor itself. EVFS works on HP-UX 11i v2 running on either PA-RISC or Itanium iron.

HP also launched a Trusted Computing on Integrity module for its entry Integrity 2660 server, which is a variant of the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) that is being deployed into ruggedized laptops and PCs. The TPM is a microcontroller module that stores passwords, digital cryptographic keys, and other information relating to the security of a PC in a way that is, in theory, unhackable. Eventually, according to Ron Luman, security architect for HP-UX, this feature will be shipping at the end of the month on this box, and will eventually be rolled out across the entry Integrity server line. (The future Windows Longhorn Server has a feature called BitLocker, which uses a TPM and works in a similar fashion, by the way.) Luman did not know if the TPM feature would be ported to HP's ProLiant server line, but this seems like an obvious thing to do.

HP-UX 11i v3 will run on both PA-RISC and Itanium servers from HP, according to Lewandowski. But she was not at liberty to say if the future HP-UX 11i v4 would support PA-RISC. HP wants to do a major HP-UX release every two to three years, which should mean that 11i v4 is expected in late 2008 to early 2009. The latest roadmap says "2009+" for the delivery date, which is not particularly useful. If 11i v4 comes out in 2009, that probably means 11i v4 will run on PA-RISC as well as Itanium. But HP-UX 11i v5, which could come out in anywhere from late 2010 to early 2012, might not run on PA-RISC, since that will be right around the 2011 support sunset date of the PA-RISC architecture. So HP-UX 11i v4 could be the end of the line for that older RISC architecture. "That's a bridge we will have to cross when we get there," says Lewandowski. "PA-RISC servers will be pervasive for some time, and we will study the v3 adoption rates on PA-RISC very closely."

HP is not saying much about HP-UX 11i v4, except that it will be a "24x7 lights out computing environment." Presumably, this means that instead of policy-based server and partition provisioning and partially manual management of workloads and partitions, HP-UX 11i v4 will have policy-based services provisioning. That future operating system will also have and what HP is calling "zero-downtime virtualization." It will also have binary compatibility for applications within their architecture--Itanium for sure and for PA-RISC if that architecture is supported. HP is also promising that all HP-UX releases--including even the far future HP-UX 11i v5--will have 10 or more years of technical and product support, and that shipping releases will continue to get enhancements--much as HP-UX 11i just did in December.

HP-UX 11i v5 is still in the planning stages at this point, and all HP is saying publicly is that it will bring on "the next wave of enterprise computing." If HP had said the next generation of enterprise computing, I could have made a Star Trek joke; but the company's roadmap didn't, so I won't.

RELATED STORIES

HP Opens Up the HP-UX Roadmap

HP-UX on Itanium Gets a Boost from IBM, TIBCO

HP Tweaks HP-UX 11i v2, Capacity On Demand

Oracle Designates HP-UX on Itanium a Strategic Platform

Revelation: Why HP's Commitment to Itanium Is Unwavering--Really

HP Bites the Bullet, Cuts TruCluster from Future HP-UX

HP Is Sure Unix Market Will Continue to Grow

HP Backcasts HP-UX 11i v2 from Itanium to PA-RISC

                     Post this story to del.icio.us
               Post this story to Digg
    Post this story to Slashdot