HP Plots New Courses with HP-UX/Tru64

Uberhacker.Com writes "HP has given up on trying to bring key parts of Compaq/DEC's Tru64 operating system into HP-UX. They had once planned for the Tru64 goodies to arrive this year and made a big deal of this quick turnaround when it first acquired Compaq. Ironically, HP also announced today that it is expanding its Alpha RetainTrust program for Tru64 UNIX customers." The linked article also notes that HP has decided that it will proceed forward with purchasing some of the technology from Veritas.

Comments

Hardly surprising

[Doctor Memory]

HP-UX has always been clunky, trying to splice in some DNA from a totally unrelated (and more technically advanced) version of Unix was a pretty tall order. They probably would have had better luck porting Tru64 over to PA-RISC and trying to merge in the bits they really wanted from HP-UX.

Re:Hardly surprising

[PornMaster]

Well, porting Tru64 to PA-RISC would have been silly because they're killing that off, too.

Of course, I think they should have just kept the fucking Alpha line...

Re:Hardly surprising

[Viol8]

OSF/1 , Tru64 , [insert its name this week] might have been advanced once back in the mid 90s but once compaq got hold of it things started to stagnate feature wise compared to other unixes (probably because some pissant PC company didn't really have a clue what to do when faced with "real" machines and heavyweight 24/7 uptime customers). People knock HP-UX but personally I find it pretty good, plus the hardware is a damn site more reliable than Suns sorry offerings.

Re:Hardly surprising

[flaming-opus]

Tru64 definately is a better Unix. However, it has never been very successful in the commercial marketplace. Switching over to a Tru64 system would completely alienate the hp-ux customers, and there are MORE hp-ux customers.

HP-UX is an old relic, (seriously. working in the HP kernel is like looking at ATT unix from the mid 80's), but it works. It has the virtualization features one might expect from a high-end unix, and a lot of software support. It doesn't preform particularly quickly, and it's kinda obscure and clunky. What it really lacks is a mature 3rd generation filesystem, which is why it comes bundled with Vxfs.

Dec's AdvFS is not really any better than Veritas, except that it's so nicely integrated with Truclusters. I don't know how well Veritas' clustered filesystem works, but it runs on solaris and linux. Thus you can run both linux and hp-ux on vpars within the same hp server, and share data. Though I really liked trucluster/cfs, it would only be really helpful if they ported to both linux and hp-ux.

Appart from making the Tru64 -> HP-UX transition harder, I don't see that they lose any features by picking veritas over CFS. It just seems like hiring a few more engineers would have been cheaper than playing this back-and-forth game with marketing.

Re:Perhaps I'm naive

[Viol8]

"based on the same code"

Back in 1985. Things have diverged a bit since then and any code (such as clustering) would have been written from scratch anyway and have nothing to do with any original BSD or SysV code.

A little odd.

[the talented rmg]

It's strange they'd suddenly cut their losses like this, but with the pressure from Linux and the Open Source world on the unix market, one would expect HP and others to abandon projects like this in favor of projects where the competition isn't literally giving it away.

Ultimately, manufacturers like HP and Sun are increasingly pushed into niche and legacy markets as PCs get faster and Linux and BSD become more capable. I would expect more withdrawals like this in the future rather than less.

More than that, HP has seen considerable pressure from younger webmasters who see their business practices as inequitous and dangerous. Admittedly such efforts are probably scattered and short lived, but they seem to have some sympathy amongst conservative culture warriors as well. Ultimately, only time will tell whether these efforts have any effect on HP's bottom line.

good opportunity to say

[theguywhosaid]

HP-SUX.

I mean it in a nice way though.

They are letting Alpha CPUs die, even though they rock, because they sank so much money into Itanium.

They are dropping a Unix better than their own, because they can't suck it up and admit Tru64 is better. (I am taking your word for it #6336)

HP-SUX

Re:good opportunity to say

[runderwo]

Actually, it seems like they are trying to kill off two CPU architectures (PA-RISC and Alpha) as well as two Unixes (HP-UX and Tru64), all so that they are less distracted from betting the farm on Itanium and Linux/Windows. It's rather a shame that the years of effort and innovation that went into those architectures and systems are due to be wasted in such a tepid manner.

Re:good opportunity to say

[DAldredge]

That is what happens when you make a History major who only cares about her personal income the CEO of your company.

They question people should be asking is why the board hasn't fired her yet.

Re:good opportunity to say

[DAldredge]

And what portions of HP performance since she has been running the place show that she learned anything from those pieces of paper? She doesn't care about the shareholders as long as she gets her money, that is why almost all longterm R&D at HP has been killed.

Customers

[b0lt]

What happens when their customers already committed to Tru64? Are they left out to dry? (My work was going to go to Tru64)

So typical of the new HP

[haggar]

My boss and I have been just talking about this. HP is junking all of their best technologies. Ttu64 had a best of breed clustering. So, what does HP do? Junk it and buy the technology from Veritas.

No surprise they junked the Alpha. No surprise they even junked the PA-RISC. No wonder they are becoming another Dell. Yep, HP used to mean quality at a higher cost - but people were willing to put up with that because HP anything was going to work with precision, reliably for the next century. Now, the HP servers and spares we are getting are less and less reliable.

Tru64 / OpenVMS

[Exter-C]

Its a shame that DEC / Compaq and now HP have not really supported one of the most advanced and stable operating systems the world has ever seen. Having been a long term alpha processor / server user with both OpenVMS and Tru64 it was such a shame what happened to DEC, Alpha, OpenVMS, Tru64. It just goes to show that at the end of the day the best products may not survive.