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

Two big piles of stuff on top of standard Unix

[shoppa]

Both Tru64 (or whatever it's called this month, I've been using it for over a decade now, so I still tend to call it OSF/1, and occasionally slip into Digital Unix) and HP-UX have a lot of layers added on over their core of "standard" Unix. (Others will go into great detail about how these are neither "standard" Unix cores but some variant of some variant of some variant of some microkernel but nobody cares anymore, that is really so early 90's.) They both have extensive system management GUI's, of course not compatible with each other, as well as fundamentally different "clustering" support. (Note my quotes, whenever you talk about any other product's clustering you always denigrate it by quoting that word.) To mix the two together is a holy living nightmare.

Most sites that are migrating are going away from both as fast as they can. There are a small fraction that truly depend on clustering or other proprietary feature, unfortunately everybody is holding on tenaciously to said features despite the fact that they really do 99% of the applications no good. And most commercial applications have been somehow hoodwinked into the proprietary hooks.

Re:Perhaps I'm naive

[GreatBallsOfFire]

They're not based on the same code. Tru64 came from OSF/1 which was a clean room rewrite of Unix, back when AT&T was the evil OS overlord. It was written by IBM, HP and DEC. Only Digital stuck with it, and renamed it twice: OSF/1 -> Digital UNIX -> [Digital|Compaq|HP] Tru64. And that's the point, that they are so incompatible that the task was monumental in the way HP approached it.

Enough said.

I'll miss you, Digital Unix

[CharAznable]

Sad to see how superior technology gets caught up in corporate mergers and gets killed. First, the DEC faithful had to swallow up the indignity of seeing DEC swallowed up by a Compaq, and then this...
I spent many a nights hacking Fortran on DEC boxes running everything from Ultrix to Digital Unix 4.. those were the good times..

Why did HP buy Compaq?

[yorkpaddy]

I understand why they bought Compaq, but why not spin off Digital. I wish Compaq had never bought Digital. Digital did a lot of cool things, Compaq was able to help them some, but HP has no idea what to do with their stuff.

Re:Aargh! This is really frustrating!

[bsdnazz]

Having first used VAXClusters in 1987 eveything else I've come across seems toy in comparison. A VAXCluster gave us disk that worked just like a local disk but was shared across the cluster. No one VAX 'owned' it (no LAVC here!). It's peer to peer disk sharing with all the lockin problems sorted. We ran a navigational database (VAX RMS) over the VAXCluster with 3 VAXes and hundreds of users.

If VAXCluster technology is lost then it's a tragic waste of a good technology.

Re:Maybe if they would bring back VMS,,,

[Mr. No Skills]

I wish I shared your enthusiasm. While I know its still around (we installed a DS20E in the lab this year) and many of our clients use it, HP's committment to the Alpha line is gone, and it's committment to VMS (OpenVMS) is only to ease the yelling of a handful of large federal accounts. I do know how easy it is to sleep when responsible for VMS systems, and I hate seeing it go, but without a vendor seeing this as a strategic product it's not going to happen.

I don't blame HP completely, as the DEC-Compaq thing started the ball rolling, but they clearly don't need HP-UX, Tru64, MPE, and VMS as proprietary operating systems while they consolidate the world onto Intel chips.

The Alpha line's part costs are crazy, there's no support for emerging things like iSCSI, every software vendor has long since ported their products to UNIX/Windows platforms and no one considers VMS a primary development environment anymore. Many Alphas won't die, as they are well engineered machines that will run longer than anything coming off a Dell assembly line now, and the loyalty of VMS technical people will keep them running without the need for endless patches from Redmond. Eventually, however, they will just be an old app in the back office that no one remembers anything about and they keep around just because someone in accounting still occaisionally looks up things on it and no one is demanding support or license for it.

Why the fuck would anyone want to run AdvFS?

[multiplexo]

I worked at Amazon.com when we had major, major problems with AdvFS filesystems shitting all over themselves in Digital Unix 4.0E and 4.0F in late 1999 and early 2000. Compaq's advice was to take the affected filesystems offline once a month and run AdvFS verify on them, which, since it took six to eight hours to run on a filesystem of any size, kind of fucked up our goal of hitting 5 nines uptime. Dealing with Compaq's technical support at the time was similarly painful. I recall calling them late one night in November of 1999 when a filesystem went bad and spending almost 2 hours in a phone tree from Hell before I finally got an engineer on the line who even knew what an AdvFS filesystem was. This was with a Compaq gold support contract.

When Amazon switched over to HP servers running HP/UX 11 in 2000 there were a lot of annoying things about the change in operating systems but as far as the filesystems went I thought that I had died and gone to heaven. LVM on HP was rock stable and simple compared to the insanely complex LSM on Digital Unix, and the HP's filesystem didn't shit itself the way that AdvFS, which we referred to as the "Adventure FileSystem" because using it was a real adventure in finding out whether or not your files would be available in a day's time, did. I for one won't miss AdvFS.

Re:So typical of the new HP

[Anonymous Coward]

During my stint at HP, I saw:

1) HP buy Verifone for the payment gateway and POS card terminal business, then basically junk the card reader business through sheer atrophy AND eventually the same thing with the software line. Really ticked off the Royal Bank of Canada who was a key customer for the Internet payment gateway. That cost around a $1.0B if I recall.

2) Invest $200 odd million on an agreement with BEA to co-market their application server solutions;

3) Buy Bluestone and drop the BEA agreement.

4) Junk the Bluestone product and, if memory serves me correct, re-pen a new agreement with BEA for probably another $100 M.

And a few other acquisitions that also eventually got the gas (Panacom thin client division in Waterloo, ON comes to mind.)

Point is that HP does have a questionable record for acquisitions. But back then, it was overshadowed by the flood of new innovations that came out of HP Labs. Some good, some not so good.

From what I see at the new HP, they're placing less of an emphasis on invention (despite the HP Invent handle) and looking more to acquisitions while STILL cocking it up.

I don't get it, but I'm glad I'm not there.

Re:Maybe if they would bring back VMS,,,

[sasami]

Alpha is well-documented. When I worked at DEC, we had these all over the place.

At the moment, the problem is not emulation on Itanium... the problem is that Alpha is faster than Itanium. Heh.

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Dum de dum.