HP Ships Enhanced Enterprise-Class HP-UX Operating System
Unmatched Binary Compatibility Enables Smooth and Immediate Upgrade
PALO ALTO, Calif., July 24, 1995 -- Delivering on its commitment to provide the General Business Release of HP-UX(1) 10.0, Hewlett-Packard Company today announced it is shipping the release for HP 9000 servers and workstations.
Version HP-UX 10.0 General Business Release is poised for immediate adoption by customers as more than 80 percent of key Channel Partners have made their top solutions available on HP-UX Version 10.
Examples of some of these partners include:
HP-UX 10.0 General Business Release provides the complete solution for the HP 9000 installed base: availability of update tools, upgrade support services and a plethora of applications. HP-UX 10.0, which began shipping to new business customers in early March, has proven its high quality in production environments running on HP 9000 uniprocessor workstations to 12-way Model T500 Corporate Business Servers.
Several new products have been added to or enhanced for HP-UX 10.0 General Business Release that focus on the needs of business-critical and network-intensive environments. New products bundled in HP-UX 10.0 General Business Release include journaled file system (JFS), network file system diskless and symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) for workstations. Additionally, a new file-system-management product, HP OnLineJFS, now is available for HP-UX 10.0 General Business Release. Further high-availability enhancements now are available for MC/ServiceGuard, an enterprise clustering solution. With these additions, HP-UX continues to excel as a robust enterprise-class operating environment that offers superior performance scalability, high availability and manageability.
JFS and OnLineJFS
The journaled file system (JFS) is a high-integrity, highly available file system included with HP-UX. This feature offers very fast file-system recovery during system reboot. HP-UX JFS provides higher file I/O for OLTP-intensive environments than other vendor implementations, which retrofit journaling into a Berkeley Software Design (BSD)-style file system.
HP OnLineJFS provides on-line management of JFS to maintain maximum system availability. The file system can be resized, backed up or defragmented dynamically -- without requiring planned downtime. Applications can continue to access the file system while these routine maintenance activities are performed on the file system.
"Since we introduced Version 10.0, it's proven to be excellent for customers seeking the highest quality and system availability," said Bernard Guidon, HP vice president and general manager of the Computer Systems Group. "We are offering a powerful portfolio of advanced products and ease of manageability, both of which are instrumental to creating a competitive advantage."
Network File System Diskless
HP-UX 10.0 General Business Release includes network file system-based diskless protocol, an implementation of industry-standard technology and an example of HP's commitment to and leadership in open-systems environments.
Network file system diskless provides expanded hardware-configuration capabilities, such as FDDI, multiple LAN card support and gateway booting. It also has improved client/server connectivity during reboot or a LAN break, as well as multiprocessor support.
Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) for Workstations
HP-UX 10.0 General Business Release has been designed specifically to support workstation users who want to expand their capacity by adding additional processors to their system. HP has leveraged its experience in high-end SMP systems and to support desktop users with the new HP-UX 10.0 release.
SMP allows desktop users to increase the total throughput of concurrent processes, such as simulations or queries, or reduce the time for completion of a single process. For example, with HP-UX 10.0 General Business Release on the new HP 9000 Model J210, users can simultaneously model visual behavior and simulate second-order effects, or they can simply apply all processing power to reduce the time for one simulation.
Full Performance Scalability
HP-UX Version 10 provides superior performance for a wide range of application environments. For customers who require mainframe-class performance, HP-UX 10.0 on the T500 Business Server (eight and 12-way SMP) has demonstrated industry-leading OLTP with recently published TPC-C results.
Oracle Corp. selected HP-UX and the T500 to publish their first-ever TPC-C results. The powerful combination of tightly linked operating system and database technology, highly tuned PA-RISC processors, and joint research and development resulted in the world's highest TPC-C result.
Another measure of the performance leadership offered by HP-UX is with the highest-ever SAP R/3 benchmark result on SAP's leading R/3 sales and distribution suite with more than 108,000 transactions per hour using HP-UX 10.0 and a 10-way T500. HP-UX 10.0 also offers world-class performance for network-intensive file-server environments -- recently achieving 4,363 IOPS in the LADDIS benchmark on the HP 9000 K-class server.
High Availability Update -- Multicomputer/ServiceGuard Enhancements
HP-UX 10.0 General Business Release also contains enhancements to MC/ServiceGuard, HP's premier Enterprise Cluster product. MC/ServiceGuard has been enhanced to support the high-speed system connect I/O bus available on the new HP 9000 K-class servers. Recovery times for full node failures can be as fast as 45 seconds. During this time, MC/ServiceGuard detects the failure, reconfigures the cluster and begins executing the control script for the application to run on an alternate node.
MC/ServiceGuard also has been enhanced to support HP's advanced communication controller X.25 card, supporting highly available services across X.25 networks. This new capability provides support for switched virtual circuits and permanent virtual circuits.
Special toolkits are now available to assist users in creating Enterprise Clusters which support network file system or relational databases, including Oracle, Sybase, Progress and Informix. These toolkits enable faster, more accurate, implementations of enterprise clusters.
Smooth Upgrade and Customer Support
HP provides several tools for users to ensure a straightforward process of upgrading from HP-UX 9.0 to HP-UX 10.0. Fast transition links, which are transparent to applications, makefiles and scripts, provide binary compatibility for the transition to the SVR4 file system directory layout. In addition, if they choose, customers can use the analysis and conversion tool kits and remove hard-coded file-system references so that their code and scripts are no longer dependent upon fast transition links.
"Customers in the open systems industry have consistently voiced their concerns about costly migrations to take advantage of new functionality," said Guidon. "This release makes it simple and cost effective for customers to upgrade to HP-UX 10.0, and the majority of our customers have told us they are planning to make an immediate upgrade."
"We have been very pleased with the smoothness of our upgrade to this new version of the operating system," said Cynthia Recker, manager of CIM Analytical Systems at Motorola Inc. "We used one of the tools to scan the system configuration and update the systems to HP-UX 10.0 General Business Release, and were able to run the applications without needing to make any modifications. We are going to implement HP-UX 10.0 General Business Release because our newest factories are deploying HP's K-class computers, and we plan to have all systems at the same baseline. We expect the process to be as smooth as any other HP-UX upgrade we've experienced."
Complementing HP's comprehensive support suite is an optional-upgrade-planning-assistance service. HP upgrade specialists work closely with customers to develop a complete and effective upgrade plan for a specific system. Experienced upgrade engineers also are available to implement the plan.
U.S. Prices
A two-user license for the HP-UX 10.0 run-time environment is bundled with HP workstations and servers, with additional license levels available.
Prices for OnLineJFS range from $995 to $8,000. Prices for MC/ServiceGuard range from $3,900 to $24,000. JFS and network file system diskless are features of HP-UX and are included in the price of HP-UX.
HP-UX users have access to more than 10,000 UNIX system-based applications. Users can access DOS-based and Macintosh applications through emulation.
HP is the second-largest computer supplier in the United States, with computer-related revenue of $19.6 billion in its 1994 fiscal year.
Hewlett-Packard Company is a leading global manufacturer of computing, communications and measurement products and services recognized for excellence in quality and support. HP has 98,600 employees and had revenue of $25 billion in its 1994 fiscal year.
(1) HP-UX 9.X and 10.0 for HP 9000 Series 700 and 800 computers are X/Open(tm) Company UNIX 93 branded products.
X/Open is a trademark of X/Open Company Limited in the UK and other countries.
UNIX is a registered trademark in the United States and other countries, licensed exclusively through X/Open Company Limited.