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HP updates Unix with Vigilant HP-UX 11i v3 Update 4

By Sean Michael Kerner on April 17, 2009 10:16 AM

From the 'teaching an old OS new tricks' files:

HP today officially released its latest Unix operating system, with HP-UX 11i v3 Update 4, codenamed Vigilant.

InternetNews.com got a preview of the new release back in March. Vigilant includes enhanced data protection,high-availability and disaster tolerance features.

With the new release, HP has also taken a interesting step forward in how HP-UX customers actually migrate to new releases. Typically, HP-UX was updated by way of a physical media update, but now HP has an online operating system update. HP claims that new online update options can save up to 50 percent of the downtime that might be required to do an update with physical media.

HP updates the HP-UX operating system in the spring and fall of each year. The last update was October's HP-UX 11iv3 Update 3, with the previous spring update (Update 2) arriving in April 2008.

HP is not planning on an HP-UX version 12 anytime sooner either as a big version number change like that might signifiy some kind of big kernel binary change. With HP-UX, the real key that HP has explained to me over the years is compatability with older version and as such HP-UX 11i is likely to stick around for some time to come.

While HP-UX has now been around for 25 years, and is a solid mission critical operating system platform, it is increasingly coming into more direct competition against Linux. HP supports both Unix and Linux, but HP has told me in the past that they still see Unix as the more mature OS.

"Linux is just younger, and it's just not as far along in terms of building out the full repertoire of capabilities that enterprise IT is looking for," Brian Cox, director of software planning and marketing for Business Critical Systems at HP Cox said. "If you look at any kind of IT deployment where you're having to process million of transactions per second or having to handle queries on data warehouse in the tens of terabytes, it's still really beyond proven capability of Linux."

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