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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.
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.
Just junk food for thought...
Trying to port the Tru64 clustering features into HP/UX was a bit like trying to fit a jet engine into a Yugo.
"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.
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.
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.
A Proud Member of the Reality Oriented Community.
"Bring back?" We just installed a new HP Alpha DS 25: 2 1 GH processors, 2 GB RAM, a ton of hard drive space, OpenVMS 7.3.2. It's replacing a DEC (yes, a Digital) Alpha 2100. Wow, it's sweet. I just tried a job that once took all night on the old machine run in less than 15 minutes on the new one. Our month-end processing that once took 4 hours can run in around 40 minutes.
OpenVMS is still around, it's still running, and it's better than ever. I suppose the question is what will happen when the Alphas die.
JA
http://www.johnalex.org/
Some of the TruCluster stuff is REALLY COOL!
For those not familiar, picture a filesystem that can be mounted on 2 or more hosts at once instead of mounted from one then NFS-exported (or Samba, either way) from one host to all the others.
TruCluster was way ahead of its' time, the Digital guys were WAY ahead of their time.
This just really ticks me off because the Veritas version is NOT AS GOOD and has FAR MORE BUGS.
Aaargh!
Some days, I hate HP.
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
From the process scheduling code:
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
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.
What happens when their customers already committed to Tru64? Are they left out to dry? (My work was going to go to Tru64)
got sig?
"It's a good thing that HP never acquired the rights to penicillin. If they had, mankind would have perished from widespread disease while HP tried to figure out how integrate it with anthrax."
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Not an emulator; they are porting OpenVMS to Itanium. (They are not, as far as I know, emulating the Alpha instruction set; apps will need to be recompiled.)
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..
The perfect sig is a lot like silence, only louder
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.
"brxref
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.
I guess that's the problem. It is soo cool that it requires a really cool OS to work with, it has too much karma to even recognize HP-UX as an operating system.
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.
Sigged!
You are already seeing the knowledge of many Alpha engineers being put to work in products from AMD. If you recall when the Athlon was first introduced they talked about the bus design being based on the Alpha EV6.
A little non-sense now and then is relished by the wisest men. -Willy Wonka
both the reg and the inqwell have more information. Somewhere buried in the stories of the past few weeks is the strange fact that Compaq/DEC had a license for Veritas storage technology file system which they folded into Tru64 and now HP is going to pay for the licence a second time for HP-UX. Truly a sign of a management team that does not know what it has.
4 _l etters/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/02/hp_ends_tr u64/
THe letters from customers are interesting as well.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/03/hp_tru6
http://www.chipzilla.com/?article=20021
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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.
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.
Sleep is for the Weak
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.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
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.
--
Dum de dum.
Freedom is not the license to do what we like, it is the power to do what we ought.
Not an emulator; they are porting OpenVMS to Itanium.
yes, there is native openvms on itanium.
(They are not, as far as I know, emulating the Alpha instruction set; apps will need to be recompiled.)
not true. hp has a third solution. they are going to provide a "binary translation" program, that will take an openvms/alpha app (binary, not source) and generate an identical app for openvms/ia64. this means that the applications should behave identically on both platforms. this removes a lot of the validation concerns that customers may have when moving apps to a new system that is not binary compatible with what they've been using for years. this also helps in cases where the source code is either gone or impossible to build nowadays.