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

[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.

Hardly a shock.

[ScriptMonkey]

Trying to port the Tru64 clustering features into HP/UX was a bit like trying to fit a jet engine into a Yugo.

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:Maybe if they would bring back VMS,,,

[johnalex]

"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.

Aargh! This is really frustrating!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

Re:Open Source HP/UX and True64 - PLEASE

[R.Caley]

Opening HPUX would benefit us all, or make us go insane?

From the process scheduling code:

/*
* Handle sleeping processes.
*/

R_lyeh fhtagn(mglw_nafh Cthulhu, R_lyeh Ph_nglui)
{
assert (Cthulhu->mglw_nafh);
assert (Cthulhu->fhtagn);
assert (Cthulhu->R_lyeh->fhtagn);

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.

Best HP Quote

[Nom du Keyboard]

Saw this in letters to The Register. Rather sums it up well.

"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."

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.

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.