HP Updates HP-UX 11i v3, No Plans for X64 Port
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Hewlett-Packard launched its HP-UX 11i v3 variant of Unix for Itanium and PA-RISC processors in January and started shipping it in February. According to Brian Cox, director of software planning and marketing for the company's Business Critical Systems unit, HP wants to put out a new version of HP-UX every three years or so and do updates to each version every six months or so. Which means that it is time to roll up and update for HP-UX 11i v3. READ MORE >

Sun Merges Storage Back into Systems Group
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The top brass at Sun Microsystems are still rejiggering the organization to get a different alignment for its products. On Tuesday, Jonathan Schwartz, the company's president and chief executive officer, announced in his blog that Sun was going to merge its server and storage groups into a single Systems Group, reflecting the view of Sun's techies and its CEO that servers, storage, and networking are converging. READ MORE >

BrandZ Containers, xVM Partitions to Host Legacy Solaris Applications
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Unix operating system and server maker Sun Microsystems has put a brand name on its implementation of the open source Xen hypervisor from XenSource, soon to be part of Citrix Systems: xVM. The x is for X64 and maybe X86 and the VM, of course, is for virtual machine. Sun is also talking about how it can take its Solaris containers and adapt them to supporting applications that were coded for older versions of Solaris, not just Solaris 10 virtual private servers or a Linux runtime environment. READ MORE >

An Update from the X64 Server Battlefields
by Dan Olds

Four major vendors--Hewlett-Packard, Dell, IBM, and Sun Microsystems--are engaged in an often brutal head-to-head competition in the X64 server market. As vendors race for the biggest piece of the pie, customers are faced with conflicting claims and constantly changing technology. We believe the best way to track technology advances, figure out which new technologies are actually beneficial, and assess shifting customer perceptions about the major vendors is to go directly to the data center for answers via our ongoing Server Vendor Preference Surveys. READ MORE >