HP Debuts HP-UX 11i 1.6; BEA Partnership To Bolster Its Itanium Agenda

Hewlett-Packard Intel

On Monday, HP formally revealed plans to ship a version of HP-UX 11i optimized for Intel's next-generation Itanium 2 processor. HP-UX 11i 1.6, planned for release this year, is a significant improvement over the 11i 1.5 version that shipped for Intel's first Itanium processor in 2001, HP said. Version 11i 1.6 features a highly optimized kernel for Intel's Itanium architecture.

To boost its move to Itanium, HP has also forged a partnership with BEA Systems that calls for the leading application server vendor to optimize its popular WebLogic application server and Tuxedo product for HP-UX 11i 1.6 on the Itanium processor family.

This partnership follows news from Sun Microsystems last month that it will integrate its own Sun One application server with its forthcoming Solaris 9, deemed to be an affront to BEA, a key Sun Partner. Sun's Solaris 9 is the leading Unix operating system and competes head-to-head with the HP-UX Unix operating system.

The HP UX 11i 1.6 offering is just one aspect of HP's grand plan to move its entire hardware and software product line away from RISC to the Itanium processor family. HP plans to continue to develop and support its own PA-RISC architecture for some time, but has said that its long-term strategic direction is to move to an Itanium-based architecture.

Sun, on the other hand, intends to compete head-on with Intel's 64-bit platform by enhancing its own SPARC RISC architecture. Sun does not plan to offer a version of Solaris for Itanium and irked many customers recently by saying that it has indefinitely postponed the release of Solaris 9 for the Intel platform. Sun currently ships Solaris 8 for Intel's 32-bit platform.

According to HP, HP-UX 11i 1.6 will give Itanium 2 adopters a premiere 64-bit operating system that offers robust scalability, manageability, security and Linux support. For example, HP-UX 11i 1.6 will support up to 64 CPUs (128 CPUs by 2004), high-performance clustering via HP's MC ServiceGuard, support for encryption, IPSec and Ipv4 and Ipv6 networking standards, and Linux affinity. In the first half of 2003, for example, HP plans to offer a Linux runtime environment kit for HP UX 11i 1.6 Itanium operating system.

Taking advantage of its Compaq acquisition, HP also plans to integrate key capabilities of Compaq's Unix operating system into HP-UX, including Compaq's TruCluster technology, by 2004. HP claims to have 60,000 HP-UX installations and 1.7 million licenses.