Rumours that HP/UX dumped bunk, says HP

A senior executive at Hewlett Packard has produced a detailed rebuttal of rumours that the company is considering dumping HP/UX in favour of Linux. Hugh Jenkins, enterprise marketing manager at HP in the UK, said that his company strongly denied any such suggestion as anything other than a "playful rumour". He said: "Both operating systems are seen as important in the IA-64 arena, Win2000 obviously being the other. As you know the IA-64 version of HP-UX will give our customers binary compatibility of data from PA-RISC to IA-64 which we are very proud of. "HP-UX is seen as the key platform for delivering our Mission Critical '5 Nines' availability initiative being worked on with Cisco, EMC, Oracle, and as of yesterday SAP and BEA. This initiative ultimately aims to challenge mainframes and proprietary systems e.g. Tandem for the most critical systems space. "HP-UX still provides us with the largest scale system performance - the latest TPC-C this week comes in at 102,023 for a 32-way SMP V-Class system - later this year we hope to begin delivering our first ccNUMA configurations using 4 V-Class united in a single 128-way compute engine running a single database and operating system image- that being HP-UX. "HP is doing quite a bit with Linux - including offering 24x7 critical support services for the operating system [along with Windows NT and HP-UX. We also have Linux specific technical workstations too. While Linux is gaining quite a bit of interest in the server space - especially for Internet Infrastructure Servers - the things we are delivering/close to delivering with HP-UX like 5 Nines availability, Scalability to 100,000 tpmC, and advanced clustering and ccNUMA architectures are still very much part of some distant future for Linux." So that appears to be that. ®