HP Embraces Linux for its Toughest Servers 161
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."
correct link (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong article? (Score:2, Informative)
Non Stop architecture has a propetary OS... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Is that "NonStop", as in Tandem? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:correct link (Score:2, Informative)
Is this simply FUD or is there something to his claim?
Re:correct link (Score:1, Informative)
There are many selling in the States. (Score:1, Informative)
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.
Re:correct link (Score:1, Informative)
Found TFA! (Score:4, Informative)
Buy an HP Linux laptop instead. (Score:3, Informative)
AFAIK Ubuntu now ships on HP machines if asked also.
Re:Wrong article? (Score:1, Informative)
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ibd/2005
Re:correct link (Score:4, Informative)
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.