HP Opens Up the HP-UX Roadmap

Published: June 22, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

If Hewlett-Packard has been a little skittish about talking about its roadmap for its HP-UX Unix variant in recent years, that has had nothing to do with its commitment to the platform. HP's shyness over the years, however, has had everything to do with the difficulties that HP had coping with two distinct RISC/Unix platforms in the wake of the Compaq merger five years ago. That's water under the bridge now, and with rival Sun Microsystems hogging all the Unix press with its Solaris 10 product and OpenSolaris project, HP is ready to talk about its plans for HP-UX.

HP is willing to talk some, not a lot. So don't get that excited.

As I pointed out in a story about a month ago, the HP-UX ecosystem is a big deal for HP, so keeping it humming along and making money for the company is a key fact of life. HP was always a lot more quiet than Sun about its Unix platform and the boxes that supported them, and it quietly created a vast midrange Unix server business that did plain old boring things like support ERP applications at manufacturers, distributors, and financial services companies. Sun may have been the dot in dot-com, but HP was just a midrange server company that sold proprietary or Unix servers to lots of regular companies--like the ones a lot of you work for. (In many ways, HP resembles the old Compaq, but with a slightly bigger Unix bent, and what IBM has become with its iSeries and pSeries lines; formerly proprietary and now heavily depending on RISC/Unix sales.)

To help make its case that HP-UX mattered big time to HP, and that it wasn't trying to get people to move to Windows or Linux on its Itanium-based Integrity machines, or for that matter for its X64-based ProLiant machines, Don Jenkins, vice president of marketing for HP's Business Critical Systems unit, was permitted last month to put some numbers on the HP Unix business. As best as HP can figure, it has about 500,000 licenses of HP-UX out there in the world, and it gets between $6 billion and $8 billion a year in server, storage, software, and support sales from its HP-UX platforms--possibly as much as $10 billion.

To keep that number steady, or to grow it, HP-UX has to improve and change. Part of the original plan when HP bought Compaq five years ago was to meld their efforts in creating a single Itanium-based platform, which became the Integrity line. Because HP did not want to support two Unixes, the much smaller Tru64 Unix base lost out. HP-UX would be HP's Unix going forward. But the technically excellent TruCluster clustering extensions and the Advanced File System (AdvFS) that the former Digital portion of Compaq created for Tru64--arguably the best clustering environment anyone ever put in the market, aside from Digital's VMS and OpenVMS environments for its VAX platforms, of course--would live on inside a future release of HP-UX, called HP-UX 11i v3. This software was originally due at the end of 2003, but by the end of 2004, other file systems had caught up to TruCluster and AdvFS, according to HP, and after a year of delays, these components were pulled from HP-UX 11i v3 at the end of 2004. HP had promised to get HP-UX 11i v3 out the door by mid-2005, but then decided to backcast many of the remaining features into HP-UX 11i v2, which was initially only created for Itanium machines, and also make this software available on both Itanium and PA-RISC machines. While such moves are always deeply embarrassing to any vendor, the fact that HP sucked it up, chose Veritas file systems (now owned by Symantec), and got its act together with HP-UX 11i v2 is largely why HP's Unix business has stabilized and software vendors--including rivals like IBM and holdouts like Oracle--have embraced HP-UX on Itanium as a strategic platform.

HP-UX 11i v2 started shipping in 2003, and Jenkins says that HP's plan is to do a major release every two to three years while still maintaining binary compatibility from release to release (provided you are talking strictly about Itanium-based servers, of course). HP-UX 11i v2 brought the nPar hardware partitions and vPar virtual partitions of the Superdome machines to the Integrities, as well as performance scalability (including support for the dual-core "Montecito" Itanium chips), MC ServiceGuard clustering for high availability, and security features.

With the current incarnation of HP-UX 11i v3, HP is working on what it calls the "next level of virtualization and automation," by which it means creating a policy engine that can provision virtual and physical Integrity machines. The future HP-UX 11i v3 is due sometime in the fall, according to Jenkins, and he hedges a little and says probably the late fall. HP-UX 11i v3 will also include a "major re-engineering" of the system I/O, according to Jenkins, and will have a lot of autonomic computing features, which will help the system tune itself as workloads change.

HP-UX 11i v3 will also include improvements to the Virtual Server Environment, which is HP's collective name for its nPar and vPar partitioning and the software that manages it. The upcoming HP-UX release will have "advanced workload migration," which sounds a bit like the teleportation of workloads that the Windows and Linux communities have been able to get with VMware's ESX Server and will soon be available in IBM's AIX and in the open source Xen hypervisor from XenSource. A workload can currently be migrated in HP-UX 11i v2, says Jenkins, but it requires 70 to 80 different parameters to tune. And if you change such parameters, you have to reboot. "This is hardly a graceful workload migration," says Jenkins. Luckily, neither of HP's Unix rivals can do this, either.

The operating system will have integrated, dynamic multi-pathing and SAN agility," according to Jenkins, and he laughs and doesn't really want to explain in any detail what these are. (He gives a little, explaining that the hardware multi-pathing will allow any I/O workload to be moved dynamically along with its partition, which allows I/O and storage to find the applications and operating systems associated with a partition. Right now, this has to be done by hand, and it is not done on the fly.)

HP-UX 11i v3 will also have integrated capacity planning software and the ability to take information from a plan and implement it as a policy on real workloads. In keeping with the need for security, HP-UX 11i v3 will also include encryption for data volumes and file systems, and will sport an integrated identity management front end that will allow companies with global users to have a central control point into their HP-UX assets.

With HP-UX 11i v4, HP will have what it calls a "24x7 lights out computing environment," and instead of policy-based provisioning and partially manual management of workloads and partitions, this software will have policy-based services provisioning and what HP is calling "zero-downtime virtualization." Expect this in about two and a half to three years, which puts us into late 2008 to early 2009. Some engineers are still working on HP-UX 11i v3 right now, according to Jenkins, but 11i v4 is in the development stages.

HP-UX 11i v5 is only in the planning stages at this point, and HP is not saying anything about it, really--other than it is on the whiteboard, and if its plan holds, you can expect it in the late 2010 to early 2012 range.

"More than anything else, customers are highly interested in what degree we are innovating," explains Jenkins. He says they like the fact that HP sells them one operating system license, with hundreds of different tools and features, all integrated. "Customers choose Unix for one throat to choke and because things are integrated. This is why we believe they will continue to choose Unix, too."

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