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

Published: March 23, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

As reported elsewhere in this issue of The Unix Guardian, Hewlett-Packard this week announced its third generation of chipsets to support the Itanium processors in its Integrity server line. As part of those announcements, the company also made some changes to the HP-UX operating system and its capacity on demand offerings for the Integrity servers.

The neatest new feature HP is announcing for HP-UX 11i v2 is called Global Instant Capacity, and this is something that no one else has done as yet. According to Nick van der Zweep, director of virtualization and utility computing at HP, the Global Instant Capacity offering will allow customers to share their processors across multiple machines, activating and deactivating them as their workloads demand across, rather than just within, those machines. So, for instance, if you have 200 servers from HP, with a total of 800 processors spread across baby two-socket rx Integrity servers, a few rx Series midrange boxes, and big 64-way Superdome servers, you can divvy up those 800 processors as workload conditions dictate. So, in the morning, when the end users are taking lots of orders, you might have 400 processors activated on the Web front end, 200 on the middle tier, and another 200 on the Superdomes. But at night, when no one is taking orders and you are doing database updates and batch processing, you could put 200 processors on the Web tier, leave 100 on the middle tier and activate the remaining 500 processors on the Superdomes--if you had eight Superdomes, which HP would like you to. This Global Instant Capacity will be available in the third quarter, according to van der Zweep. HP's various instant capacity offerings were, way back when, available on entry machines, but customers didn't want them and they sure didn't want to pay a premium in the few cases where they did on such two-socket boxes, so HP does not support Instant Capacity, including this global variant, on the entry Integrity machines. Machines that use the existing sx1000 "Pinnacles" and the new sx2000 "Arches" chipset can both use Global Instant Capacity, and customers can, within limits, mix and match processor generations.

Another thing HP did this week was put out fine-tuned reference architectures for the Virtual Server Environment, which is the way HP says hard partitioning and logical partitioning on the Itanium-based Integrity machines. HP has created toolkits that have reference architectures for popular systems and application software from BEA Systems, IBM, Oracle, and SAP that can cut down the deployment time for virtualized versions of this software stack to be deployed. As an example, van der Zweep said that it can take 17 to 34 weeks to roll out a sophisticated middleware stack based on BEA WebLogic into a virtualized environment, including planning, designing and deployment. Now, using the reference architectures and toolkits HP has created, it can take four to seven weeks to accomplish the same tasks.

HP-UX 11i is getting a few other smaller tweaks this week, too. On the disaster tolerance front, HP-UX now supports SONET fiber optic networks for lower-cost connectivity for remotely located disaster recovery server clusters. In the past, HP customers often had to use so-called "dark fiber," meaning unused capacity in the telecom networks that was expressly dedicated to them, rather than the shared SONET fiber optic networks that are backbones for a lot of voice and data traffic. In any event, now HP-UX shops can lower their telecom bills. HP-UX also has support for the failover of Oracle 10g databases that are located at intercontinental distances, which was also not possible before. HP also announced that is has created extensions to its ServiceGuard high availability clustering software for the SAP ERP suite when running in the HP-UX or Linux environments, which beef up the performance and resiliency of clusters supporting the mySAP suite. And, while not related to HP-UX, HP has also worked with SAP to create what is called HP Competent Cluster Service and HP Cluster Extension, which comprise a certified SAP-Windows software stack on the Integrity servers that provides geographically distributed clustering that is certified by Microsoft, SAP, and HP. According to van der Zweep, no other platform vendor can offer this.