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Hewlett-Packard Co.'s HP-UX
Solaris is not the only enterprise Unix game in town. HP's HP-UX 11.0, released in the last quarter of 1997, brings performance and feature enhancements over HP-UX 10.2. In addition, HP also released its biggest and baddest server, the HP V Class, which is one of the top performers in TPC-C results for nonclustered systems. HP also offers complete enterprise solutions that support mission-critical applications. While corporations will have to shell out dollars for the additional support, it is a cost of doing business that many companies easily justify, especially with HP's new 99.9 percent uptime guarantee.
Among the advantages HP-UX 11.0 offers are a full 64-bit OS, the implementation of kernel threads, support for large di sk arrays and the ability to optimize memory page sizes. All of these features make 11.0 an attractive application hosting platform. In addition, the top two performing HP systems in the TPC-C benchmarks were based on HP-UX 11.0. HP was not the first to market with a 64-bit Unix offering; Digital has had one since 1994. Because HP wanted to provide backward compatibility, both 32- and 64-bit applications can run on the same HP-UX 11.0 system and communicate with each other using RPCs (Remote Procedure Calls). Besides addressing more memory and large disk capabilities, 64 bits allow for greater computing precision, making it ideal for high-end scientific or mathematical applications. Sun also has a 64-bit offering but it's not 64 bits throughout--the file system is 64 bit, but the Solaris kernel is still 32 bit. Currently, HP systems can address 16 GB of physical memory, while Solaris addresses 30 GB and NT addresses only 4 GB. Should you upgrade to HP-UX 11.0? Many ISVs will not recompile their existin g 32-bit applications to 64 bit, with the exception of higher-end database-application vendors. Thus, if your application does not take advantage of 64-bit computing, you're better off staying with 10.2 for now. On the other hand, if your application would benefit greatly from some of the additional new features in 11.0 such as IPSec, IPv6 or POPS (Performance Optimization Page Size), you might want to make the jump. Some of the technology found in HP-UX is not developed by HP. NIS (Network Information Service) and NFS are licensed from Sun. NIS and NIS+ offer a directory service function for Unix platforms. HP-UX 11.0's NFS version 3 is usable only over UDP (User Datagram Protocol). According to HP, NFS 3 over TCP will be available in the first half of this year. In addition, a 64-bit version of Veritas' Journaled File System (JFS) is available that offers extremely fast performance and greater reliability. Jay Milne can be reached at jmilne@nwc.com.
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