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HP Linux Business

HP Embraces Linux for its Toughest Servers 161

Posted by Zonk from the penguins-in-high-places dept.
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."
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HP Embraces Linux for its Toughest Servers More

HP Embraces Linux for its Toughest Servers

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  • Again? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 24, 2005 @05:14PM (#13151987)

    >in a move that suggests Linux is finally ready for prime time

    Again? I think the last time was when it was let known that linux run several important systems in stock and other vital exchanges [wstonline.com].

    • HP Needs Linux to Survive (Score:5, Interesting)

      by reporter ( 666905 ) on Sunday July 24, 2005 @05:48PM (#13152168) Homepage
      HP Unix was distinctly inferior to IBM's AIX, and moving to Linux is a way for HP to (1) jettison its own inferior product and (2) avoid the R&D costs of developing a superior operating system (OS). As for #2, there are 2 aspects: (1) feature development and (2) reliability. The vast army of open-source developers have made Linux a feature-rich OS that rivals (and likely now exceeds) IBM's AIX.

      Further, IBM has spent enormous sums of money to ensure that Linux is reliable. IBM will soon discover that this aspect of Linux is the Achille's heel of open source. By using Linux, HP essentially gets a free ride from IBM and need not spend the money to ensure that Linux is reliable. IBM has already done the work.

      I can already hear the grinding of the reduction-in-force axe at the OS department of HP.

      • Except that they bought tru-64 with Compaq (who got it from Dec), and then chose HP-UX because it was "technologically superior".

        Yeah, Right.

        *BZZZZZZZT*

      • Re:HP Needs Linux to Survive (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Compuser ( 14899 ) on Sunday July 24, 2005 @06:41PM (#13152424)
        Don't worry about IBM. Having core developers in-house
        boosts their services part. If HP cuts their devs
        and goes with Linux without R&D part in place then
        their efforts to develop their service business
        (something they dearly want) will hit the wall sooner
        rather than later.
      • HP needs *LINUX* to survive, or does HP *NEED* Linux for *HP* to survive?

        How funny... "buddies is my anti-script image word...
      • Further, IBM has spent enormous sums of money to ensure that Linux is reliable. IBM will soon discover that this aspect of Linux is the Achille's heel of open source. By using Linux, HP essentially gets a free ride from IBM and need not spend the money to ensure that Linux is reliable. IBM has already done the work.

        I don't think they can get away with plain "free ride".

        The benefit of having their own developers is that they can offer cutting-edge code after their own in-house testing and thus be ahead

      • Re:HP Needs Linux to Survive (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Listen, kids, what this really is is a consolidation play. That is, a strategy to fire NonStop software engineers and start replacing what they would have written from the Open Source pile. BTW, when HP Linux management is being candid they'll admit that for HP Linux is just a cheap layer that sits between their hardware and Oracle. (I've heard this from them myself.)
      • Having worked on HP-UX and AIX, I have to say that I don't see HP-UX as being inferior to AIX.

        My personal experience is that AIX seems quite unrefined and buggy. It seems more like a clone of Unix (than say Linux.)

        Perhaps I've just scraped the surface of both. I definately think Linux has more features than both HP-UX and AIX.

      • Re:HP Needs Linux to Survive (Score:4, Insightful)

        by nihilogos ( 87025 ) on Sunday July 24, 2005 @11:24PM (#13153748)
        Further, IBM has spent enormous sums of money to ensure that Linux is reliable.

        They haven't even spent a fraction of the amount of money that they would have in developing their own operating system from scratch.

        IBM will soon discover that this aspect of Linux is the Achille's heel of open source.

        I'm sure they were already aware that contributing to a GPL project means other people can use your code.

        By using Linux, HP essentially gets a free ride from IBM and need not spend the money to ensure that Linux is reliable. IBM has already done the work.

        I doubt IBM spent any time worrying about how to support the sort of redundancy that goes into the NonStop servers. HP would have had to contribute a lot of that themselves, and guess what? IBM gets access to all that code.

      • Re:HP Needs Linux to Survive (Score:5, Interesting)

        by WindBourne ( 631190 ) on Sunday July 24, 2005 @11:34PM (#13153779) Journal

        First, I have worked for both HP and IBM.

        Even though I am a die-hard Linux coder, I would say that HP-UX is NOT inferior to AIX. I have worked on both, and I would say they are the same. What really matters is the support that the company offers. Can you count on the company to provide patches quickly? Is the hardware solid. Once again, I think that both companies make good equipment (but on the lower-end, I would only buy from one of them).

        As to the achilles heel of open source, IBM is much brighter than you about this. Several things:

        1. Other than MS, ALL actively supported OS are money losing operations. Even for Apple, they lose money. Once active support stops (i.e. about 6 developers), then the company makes money (HP has made millions off HP-3000 once they stopped active support). The OS exists to sell hardware.
        2. HP has been contributing to the OSS world for some time. They may get a bit of a free ride, but they will also have to contribute more or will be unable to say that they offer the best support. IOW, IBM and the other companies will be having "free" rides.
        3. It is EXPENSIVE to create an OS and then run in on only one platform. That is how MVS/CICS/etc is on the mainframe. Or how OS-400 on the as-400. Or AIX on power-pc systems. Linux is on all of their systems (and their competitiors). Soon, Linux will be #1 for IBM due to ability to scale across the hardware. If an Intel does not cut it, then Power-PC it. If needing more, that AS-400, followed by the big boy.

        Yes, HP will get some free software, but IBM is getting 10s of millions of support from everybody else.

        As to the axe, well it will fall in all the major tech. companies. They are all pulling a fast one. In the past, they would lay-off in the states or in EU, and openly hire in India/China at the same time. Now, they are going through fast up and downs. Well if you watch carefully, the up is hiring in India/China, and then 6-9 months later, they announce a slow-down and lay off. You are simply looking at the shifting of ALL tech companies to overseas. IBM and Sun will soon announce another round of layoffs. While the American economy is still lousy, so you will not notice.

        • If an Intel does not cut it, then Power-PC it. If needing more, that AS-400, followed by the big boy.

          AFAICR, it's been long since AS/400 has converted to POWER. And a mainframe's advantage is on its software, instrumentation and thoroughput, and all these can be replicated on POWER -- so no gain going big iron other than in the way it's already been used.


      • By using Linux, HP essentially gets a free ride from IBM and need not spend the money to ensure that Linux is reliable.

        Large organizations buying into Linux for its many advantages are naturally cautious and skeptical.

        Especially about the part where the answer to "Who owns Linux? (translation: "Who is responsible for Linux in case I need help?") is essentially "No one for sure, everyone with probability, and less goes wrong anyway." leaves decision makers with mixed feelings.

        Then, the answer to the qu

  • But of course... (Score:4, Funny)

    by eno2001 ( 527078 ) on Sunday July 24, 2005 @05:14PM (#13151991) Homepage Journal
    Linux is the OS most suited to big iron.

    • of course (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      but only if you live in Fanboy Land where Linux is the answer to every computer-related problem.
    • I dunno about what's "most suited to big iron", but I do know that 45 of Netcraft's top 50 uptime list run some type of BSD (as of the authoring of this post):

      http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html [netcraft.com]

      Regardless of applicability to the topic at hand, that's a pretty impressive statistic.

      (Apologies for not citing more than one statistic in a post like this. I know it's pretty much useless as-is.)

      • Re:But of course... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Mikey-San ( 582838 )
        More apologies for forgetting to factor in the BSD/IIS combinations. Those are probably Windows/IIS boxes running through BSD proxies.

        "My bad," as the kids say.
      • No wonder linux doesn't appear in that list,

        if you looked at this page on netcraft's site...
        http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/accuracy.html [netcraft.com]
        You would see the following information...

        Additionally HP-UX, Linux, NetApp NetCache, Solaris and recent releases of FreeBSD cycle back to zero after 497 days, exactly as if the machine had been rebooted at that precise point. Thus it is not possible to see a HP-UX, Linux or Solaris system with an uptime measurement above 497 days.

      • Re:But of course... (Score:5, Funny)

        by cmstremi ( 206046 ) on Sunday July 24, 2005 @07:31PM (#13152697) Homepage
        Site #32 is "www.kimberlykupps.com", #37 is "www.adults-online.com" and #50 is "www.wendywhoppers.com"?

        I guess I'm not quite sure why I should be surprised that adult sites are up there on the list, but I am.

        Perhaps netcraft factors boyancy into the ol' uptime equation?
      • That's not so much of a damning statistic for linux as for windows. Linux's system clock only goes up so far (420 days? Something like that) so its uptime resets past that, one of the worlds stupidest bugs in my opinion (is it that hard to fix? It definitely hurts the cred of linux). However you're right - BSD rocks.

  • correct link (Score:5, Informative)

    by oringo ( 848629 ) on Sunday July 24, 2005 @05:14PM (#13151992)
    The link given in the story is bad. There's a good story listed in yahoo news: http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ibd/20050 720/bs_ibd_ibd/2005720tech01 [yahoo.com]

    • Re:correct link (Score:2, Informative)

      by Murphy Murph ( 833008 )
      How much truth is there to this quote by Fink?

      Fink: IBM has long touted Linux on the mainframe.

      Yet we don't see a lot of installations out there being used in a constructive way.

      Rather than just do Linux on a mainframe, we want to bring those mainframe-class capabilities to Linux and open source. That's the part IBM hasn't done.

      IBM talks loud about open source, but I don't see a lot of credibility there.

      IBM hates the GPL.

      They do everything they can to avoid the GPL because they don't like the GPL mo

      • Re:correct link (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        IBM mainframe Linux usually runs in a virtual partition. All the (un)sexy mainframe stuff is managed by the underlying proprietary VM OS and not Linux itself.

        • Re:correct link (Score:1, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Even when it's not run on top of VM, LPAR and the Hypervisor still abstract away a lot of the hardware...

    • Re:correct link (Score:5, Interesting)

      by FireAtWill ( 559444 ) on Sunday July 24, 2005 @06:15PM (#13152303)
      Thanks for the correct link.

      Having found the correct article, I'll be interested to see if this ever sees the light of day. I did spend a bit of time working on Tandem Non-Stop systems (since acquired by Compaq, and hence, by HP).

      Working on Tandems was kind of like visiting another planet and seeing how an alien race might do operating systems. Hardware-wise, everything is redundant - from the CPUs, to the power supplies, to the system bus. Supposedly, a failure in any one component couldn't bring the system down. Everything was designed to survive a failure. Creating a fault tolerant system was supposed to be easy - except that all the software had to be designed to respond appropriately to a failure event.

      The system could definitely use an upgrade using Linux. It was limited to eight character file names (no filename extensions) and you could use directories and subdirectories - only. There was no such thing as a subdirectory of a subdirectory. Just two levels.

      The operating system was built around a messaging system that was fast enough for ATM transactions, but was useless for batch type data crunching operations (unfortunate, since somebody at this shop had selected it to do exactly that task.)

      If they're thinking about this on the same lines as the original vision of the NonStop operating system, the version of Linux that comes of this will be completely non-applicable to any hardware but HP's. Everything will need to be rewritten/tweaked. Starting with Linux will help their other deficiencies, but will result in a really weird Linux derivative.

      But in the end, IMHO, the whole concept is flawed because, while interesting, it only addressed component failure and not disasters such as fires or tornados, etc. At the same time I was working on this system, I read a story about a mass transit system in Denmark automatically (and successfully) failing over to another system in another city as a result of a fire. That seemed far more robust. And those systems were running OpenVMS.
      • > But in the end, IMHO, the whole concept is flawed because, while interesting, it only addressed component failure and not disasters such as fires or tornados, etc.

        The NonStop machines and many other machines in the same market segment support links to physically distributed systems for precisely that disaster scenario. This can work in one of two basic ways: either each transaction is sent to two+ machines before commit or a copy of the database audit trails are sent as an online mirror to a slave sy
      • Tandem has a Unix-like "OSS" side now. It and especially the C++ compiler are not as rock-solid as the NSK side of the OS.

        I'm really not sure of the value of running Linux. Any value on a Tandem is gained by running under NSK and accessing Gaurdian files, not OSS files. They'd probably gain more by just improving the OSS side and fixing that C++ compiler.
      • I read a story about a mass transit system in Denmark automatically (and successfully) failing over to another system in another city as a result of a fire.
        Oh the mental images. "Ladies and gentlemen, we regret to inform you that, due to a fire, this service has now been halted. Please board the waiting buses and recommence your trip in Copenhagen."
      • Sun has a product line with machines which are designed to be fire proof (ok, for a limited amount of time). The design is made so that the data survives a more physical disaster.

        The HP non-stop machines are not the old tandems, but HP-Ux machines. I have not heard of any Tandems being sold for the last decade, I know some still running ones in banking environments as transaction machines, since they do that great.

      • Re:correct link (Score:4, Informative)

        by iGN97 ( 83927 ) on Monday July 25, 2005 @02:38AM (#13154313) Homepage
        I currently work with the HP NonStop on the server side doing financial transaction processing.

        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.

    • Nice story, bad title. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ron_ivi ( 607351 ) <sdotno@NOSpAM.cheapcomplexdevices.com> on Sunday July 24, 2005 @06:23PM (#13152331)
      The story's titled "HP Propelling Linux Into Truly 'Big' Time"

      Considering

      • Linux is the leading OS in the Top-500 supercomputers, and
      • Linux runs large clusters such as Google, and
      • Linux runs a bunch of stuff for Schwab, ETrade, etc -
      • and this other computer company that's a bit bigger than HP called IBM already noticed Linux
      I think this article is badly misnamed.

      The article should have been titled

      "Linux Propelling HP into Truly 'Big' Time".

      • IBM had Aix, they adopted Linux and run it on alot of their boxes. The end result is pretty much Linux with a little oeming here and there.

        SGI had Irix, they adopted Linux and ripped the kernel to pieces to fit into their Altix hardware. End result is linux that doesn't feel like linux.

        HP had hpux, they adopted Linux as a way to follow IBM and SGI's footstep. They are totally lost in translation right now.

        In all these cases, not one of these companies are brave enough to ditch their main unix OS. T

        • I agree.

          I've said for years that what Sun, HP, and IBM need to do is dump their proprietary OSs, donate all the enterprise stuff those OSs have to the Linux community (like SGI did with their file system), and back Linux all the way.

          They get two benefits from this:

          1) They get to spend their OS development money on system management add-ons that differentiate their company from the others and not on duplicating OS functions that everybody else has (with the net result that their OS is a wash when it comes
          • Sun are still in a little stronger position than SCO, they don't rely on solaris, they sell hardware and support too, which is where they make most of their money.. Solaris is given away for free and is really used to help boost hardware sales.

            • I know all that. If their hardware only runs Solaris (and they don't really want Linux), then their hardware becomes irrelevant over time as Linux takes on the abilities of Solaris.

              Not to mention that much of their hardware is more expensive than Intel commodity boxes and is being replaced rapidly by corporations.

              In fact, the only reason they open sourced Solaris was because they can't compete against cheap Linux.

              End result is the same - dump Solaris and back Linux, or go out of business.
              • Well, virtually all of their hardware is more than capable of running linux, they just push solaris because they have more control over it and solaris has a longer tried and tested reputation in the enterprise than linux.

                • Problem is, their hardware (combined with their support fees, etc.) is more expensive than commodity hardware and thus offers less performance for the same money.

                  As long as they aren't selling commodity hardware, running Linux on proprietary hardware merely staves off their demise by a few extra years. As does pushing the enterprise class capabilities of Solaris, which Linux will have one of these days anyway.

                  There's no possible way they can ever compete with Intel and the Far East at producing commodity

  • Wrong article? (Score:2, Informative)

    by ChairmanMeow ( 787164 )
    The linked article doesn't seem to mention HP or Linux in any way...

  • Always on servers? (Score:4, Funny)

    by jrockway ( 229604 ) <jon-nospam@jrock.us> on Sunday July 24, 2005 @05:17PM (#13152006) Homepage Journal
    What will they think of next!? Personally, I shut all of my servers down at 5PM so that people working late are inconvenienced and all incoming mail delivery fails! Take that, SPAM!

    Oh wait.

  • Non Stop architecture has a propetary OS... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Glasswire ( 302197 ) on Sunday July 24, 2005 @05:19PM (#13152020) Homepage
    But is now running on Itanium processors (was MIPS). I suspect the Linux connection is that you may be able to now use Linux-based tools for development and the cross-compiler -now you have to use Windows and Visual Studio IDE.

    • Learning from Linux (Score:3, Interesting)

      by new500 ( 128819 )

      that you may be able to now use Linux-based tools for development and the cross-compiler

      HP already have more than a little experience with just what you describe

      "The book ia-64 linux kernel by David Mosberger and Stephane Eranian was extremely helpful"

      from: http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/journal/ [hp.com]

      in this (very instructive) article: "Porting OpenVMS to HP Integrity Servers"

      (Integrity is one line below Superdome, both Itanium - based. Superdome IA-64 is just coming together now.)

      hmm, 'kay that doe
      • I've had the Mosberger book for years. Seminal.
        Yes, HP has by far the most Itanium OSes: (besides Windows and Linux) HP-UX, OpenVMS and now the NS OS.
        What was trying to point out was that I think many may think that Linux was going to be supported ON the NS platform - I can't imagine that would ever happen - but since the currently supported development environment is Windows with a cross-compiler that integrates into Visual Studio, Linux might be able to play the same role if a Linux native NS cross-compi

  • Don't know about stock markets... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by plj ( 673710 ) on Sunday July 24, 2005 @05:20PM (#13152026)
    ..but I'm glad that the machines my bank uses to hande their online banking site are #6, #7 and #8 on this [netcraft.com] list.

    I don't really remember, that there would have ever been any unavailablilities due to them. (But due to my ISP? Yes.)
    • Who cares about banks? I know my needs are being looked after. Check out positions 32, 36, 37, and 50. :)

    • They list [netcraft.com] a "BSD/OS" in addition to FreeBSD [as well as "NetBSD/OpenBSD"].

      My question: What is "BSD/OS" supposed to be? The old BSDi?

    • It's too bad that WindRiver basically killed BSD/OS. It was a fantastic PC server OS. Indeed, after SCO OpenServer started lacking in the early to mid 1990s, BSD/OS really took off the provided the quality that we needed. Massive uptimes were the norm, in PC server terms. Not to mention amazing performance. It really squeezed every last bit out of the system.

      It's a real shame that WindRiver chose not to (or was unable to) release the source code to BSD/OS. While FreeBSD can often be used as a comparable su

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday July 24, 2005 @05:21PM (#13152036)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • They have long touted HP-UX as their non-stop platform, but this seems to me somewhat as a concession that it, well, sucks and they need something more adoptable by the mainstream.

    I really think HP has the some of the best hardware in the market, particularly the superdome and friends, so hopefully this will help them.

    Jerry
    http://www.cyvin.org/ [cyvin.org]
    • Absolute crap : "They have long touted HP-UX as their non-stop platform,"

      find me just one use of their trademark Non-Stop in a linux blurb.

      this is modded up?

      "but this seems to me somewhat as a concession that it, well, sucks and they need something more adoptable by the mainstream."

      aha, really? Tandem was mainstream? Alpha was mainstream?

      - cough - Itanium is mainstream?

      Compaq/HP/Intel (plus contractors) ran some pretty awesome porting to get VMS and Tandem up on Itanium. This ain't "mainstream" unl

    • NotStop != non-stop (Score:3, Interesting)

      by DragonHawk ( 21256 )
      "They have long touted HP-UX as their non-stop platform..."

      I knew I was going to see this as soon as I saw the article.

      NonStop is a platform all its own. It has nothing to do with HP-UX or the HP 9000 line. NonStop used to be called "Tandem". IIRC, DEC bought Tandem, Compaq bought DEC, and HP bought Compaq, which is how it ended up in HP's hands. Somewhere along the line, it got renamed to "NonStop".

      HP-UX might be appropriate if you need 99.999% uptime. NonStop is appropriate when five nines isn't e

      • Re:NotStop != non-stop (Score:4, Interesting)

        by frodo from middle ea ( 602941 ) on Sunday July 24, 2005 @10:43PM (#13153614) Homepage
        Originally The System was called Tandem, which ran an OS (or rather kernel )called "NonStop Kernel", they even have a database called NonStopSQL.

        Later in S-series servers, the System got renamed to NonStop, the kernel got renamed to Guardian.

        About loosing CPU,Memory/System Bus you are not even scratching the surface....With 2 systems operating in Tandem (hence the name),, you can even loose an entire system, and the other one takes over, and these 2 systems can have 2 geographically remote systems in tandem, giving you complete fault tolerence.

        These systems talk to eachother over a proprietory network stack (defi. not TCP/IP) and do health monitoring. And uptime is measured in years, not months...

      • Nit: Compaq itself bought Tandem, I believe before it bought DEC.
      • "NonStop used to be called "Tandem". IIRC, DEC bought Tandem, Compaq bought DEC, and HP bought Compaq, which is how it ended up in HP's hands." Almost right, Compaq bought Tandem, then Digital.
  • ...hasn't read the article, since the current posted article mentions *nothing* of Linux, Unix, BSD, etc...

    Good job everyone!

    </Sarcastic Flame>
    • i don't know if the submitter did this on purpose (doesn't seem to be the case)...

      But the "editor" didn't rtfa, the people commenting the story also didn't rtfa, and the moderators giving +1 insighful also obviously didn't rtfa, and probably also the people metamoding also didn't rtfa

      me? i'm just ranting, of course i didn't rtfa

  • Found TFA! (Score:4, Informative)

    by Russellkhan ( 570824 ) on Sunday July 24, 2005 @06:09PM (#13152273)
    The original article seems to be inaccessible on investors.com. I found the same article [yahoo.com] on Yahoo news.
  • I wonder if HP is going to port the code from HP-UX for Linux to create vPars on their hardware, or is that going to be an HP-UX "only" feature?

  • What is Non-Stop (Score:5, Interesting)

    by minniger ( 32861 ) on Sunday July 24, 2005 @07:22PM (#13152657)
    These are systems that are really pretty cool. And really freaking expensive.

    They have nothing to do with HP-UX or Unix of any kind. They are Tadem machines (feel free to look that up).

    These are rather slow but super reliable machines with a bizzare OS that has had features for decades that mainstream os's still don't have. Take the current clustering and grid tech and meld it all together and you get something like the tandem. The company I work for came out of the tandem space. The typical intro to the machines for new hires is to note that you can smash one with a sledge hammer and you won't lose any transactions.

    Who uses these things? Banks, Banks, Banks, Airlines, Governement, Dell, etc...

    They (HP) have been working on a unixy layer to run on top of the tandem os for a number of years now. Apparently this hasn't been going too well. Sounds like Linux might help them do something similar to IBM and the VMs on the mainframe.
    • Who uses these things? Banks, Banks, Banks, Airlines, Governement, Dell, etc...

      Whoa. Dell uses HP boxes?

    • hey have nothing to do with HP-UX or Unix of any kind. They are Tadem machines (feel free to look that up).

      Here [itjungle.com] seems to be an article that explains a bit how Tandems work, and a bit about the NonStop line from HP. Here's what they say about the Tandem approach:

      Basically, instead of doubling up on server hardware (that's the 2n approach) and using high availability clustering software to keep systems in synch, Tandem created the n+1 approach, which says create a clustered system that spreads the databa

  • Uh oh, NonStop gets a new pointy-haired boss (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Monday July 25, 2005 @12:30AM (#13153962) Homepage
    Did you notice the line "Over the past seven weeks or so, I've been making sure I understand that business." This is the new guy just put in charge of the NonStop systems, making pronouncements about somehow bringing them closer to the Linux product line. This is not good.

    HP's last few decisions about the Tandem line haven't worked out too well. After acquiring Tandem, they moved that product line over to PA-RISC. (Remember PA-RISC, HP's very own microprocessor line?) As PA-RISC sank, they had to move to another processor.

    They picked the Itanium. Oops.

    NonStop customers are getting very nervous.

  • HP also works with Ubuntu (Score:3, Interesting)

    by poofyhairguy82 ( 635386 ) on Monday July 25, 2005 @12:50AM (#13154014) Journal
    HP now has Ubuntu Linux working with laptops [tomshardware.com] of all things.

    My big hope is that one day Compaq will become "HP's Desktop Linux brand" so that it can ship Linux PCs without losing Windows OEM licences on the HP side. Its the best shot for any major PC company supporting Linux on the desktop in the near future.

  • For almost 2 years now I've been running CheckPoint SecurePlatform (aka SPLAT) on HP servers for our firewalls and they've been rock solid. SPLAT is basically a customized Red Hat install that Checkpoint distributes (no, they don't charge for it) and those are the two most reliable boxes on our network. On a 5,000+ machine network, 300 of which are web servers, CPU utilization on the primary fw spiked up to 15% once on a busy day.

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