HP Embraces Linux for its Toughest Servers

Colmao writes "Investor's Business Daily wrote up an article interviewing Martin Fink, the head of HP's NonStop Unit. From the article'In a move that suggests Linux is finally ready for prime time, Hewlett-Packard is giving the free software a bigger role on some of its toughest servers.' NonStop servers are HP's most costly machines. They are designed to be always on, mission critical appliances. They are used to run some of the world's stock markets. Linux is making big moves in the datacenter and getting some much needed exposure."

Comments

correct link

[oringo]

The link given in the story is bad. There's a good story listed in yahoo news: http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ibd/20050 720/bs_ibd_ibd/2005720tech01

Re:correct link

[Murphy Murph]

How much truth is there to this quote by Fink?

Fink: IBM has long touted Linux on the mainframe.

Yet we don't see a lot of installations out there being used in a constructive way.

Rather than just do Linux on a mainframe, we want to bring those mainframe-class capabilities to Linux and open source. That's the part IBM hasn't done.

IBM talks loud about open source, but I don't see a lot of credibility there.

IBM hates the GPL.

They do everything they can to avoid the GPL because they don't like the GPL model.

Is this simply FUD or is there something to his claim?

Re:correct link

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM mainframe Linux usually runs in a virtual partition. All the (un)sexy mainframe stuff is managed by the underlying proprietary VM OS and not Linux itself.

Re:correct link

[Anonymous Coward]

Even when it's not run on top of VM, LPAR and the Hypervisor still abstract away a lot of the hardware...

Re:correct link

[iGN97]

I currently work with the HP NonStop on the server side doing financial transaction processing.

While some of your points are indeed valid, your post loses some value because it's incomplete. True, Guardian, the underlying operating system, has "odd" limitations, like eight-character filenames, etc, but most applications we write these days uses OSS, which is a POSIX-layer on top of Guardian, allowing for "normal" UNIX-style filenames. True enough, there's always something that's different enough to make straight ports of UNIX software difficult, but the work involved is usually minimal.

The key strength (IMHO) of the system, is the "pathway system", which is a transaction based, load balancing message passing system which allows you to scale an application close to infinately, across physical machines and sites. It's simple to monitor, and it allows you to see which server processes need more instances easily. It's also very easy to setup more server instances, and your application code doesn't necessarily need to take extra steps to be instantaneously scalable. It also ties into the SQL-based databases which run on the system, so errors can be effectively backed out of.

Regarding disaster-recovery, I would hardly call HP NonStop "flawed". We have a separate physical site in case of fires, bombing, etc, and although there's no "automatical" failover setup in our facilities, failover from one physical site to another is an important piece of the NonStop design, and we rely on it. It's also very convenient to have another site to run an application when doing major upgrades, etc.

Next generation NonStop-machines will also be Itanium based, which, IIRC, will allow application programmers to use Intel C/C++ which is great at optimizing and very good at conforming to standards. That being said, the current line of development tools (ETK) allow you to write C/C++ with embedded SQL on the PC, hosted in Visual Studio, cross compiling with built in deployment-features using FTP. I think it's a fairly nice environment to work with considering the age of the hardware this is running on.

If you're in the market for a platform to do massive transaction based processing, you'll do yourself a favor by considering HP NonStop.

Wrong article?

[ChairmanMeow]

The linked article doesn't seem to mention HP or Linux in any way...

Re:Wrong article?

[Anonymous Coward]

He's right, the correct article has been posted in the comments by another user.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ibd/20050 720/bs_ibd_ibd/2005720tech01

Non Stop architecture has a propetary OS...

[Glasswire]

But is now running on Itanium processors (was MIPS). I suspect the Linux connection is that you may be able to now use Linux-based tools for development and the cross-compiler -now you have to use Windows and Visual Studio IDE.

Re:Is that "NonStop", as in Tandem?

[bleak sky]

Are we talking about the remnants of Tandem being moved to Linux?

Yes, it's NonStop as in Tandem. But it's not so much about moving it to Linux, but enabling Linux to run on it (adding NonStop features to the Linux kernel), and allowing more open source projects to run on NonStop.

There are many selling in the States.

[Anonymous Coward]

Trust me. We get the calls.

Just because Linux is cool doesn't mean people have any idea how to use it.

I'd like to know where the idea got out that tech support was also free Linux instruction.

Found TFA!

[Russellkhan]

The original article seems to be inaccessible on investors.com. I found the same article on Yahoo news.

Buy an HP Linux laptop instead.

[delire]

If you want everything to work, out of the box.

AFAIK Ubuntu now ships on HP machines if asked also.