HP’s New Unix Includes Green Power Control

Hewlett-Packard is improving the availability and scalability of its servers in compute-intensive environments through enhancements to its Serviceguard Solutions software, and adding better power control to its HP-UX 11i operating system.

The Unix upgrades are designed to protect servers and mission-critical applications as a business scales its Unix environments. HP Serviceguard – part of the company’s virtual server offering – now offers online reconfiguration, integrated workload balancing and predictable performance in the A.11.19 release. It protects against hardware and software failures by organising multiple servers or server partitions into an enterprise cluster, and then monitoring the health of each node.

The latest Serviceguard offering also restores service 83 percent faster than the previous version, eliminates all planned downtime that comes with typical cluster maintenance and configuration tasks, integrates workload balancing capabilities, and improves security for privacy data, in compliance with IPv6 and mixed IPv4 and IPv6 environments, as required by some national regulations.

The new Serviceguard release also uses a graphical display of the relationships between applications to reduce administration costs by 25 percent.

The HP-UX 11i v3 Update 4 — which runs on HP’s Integrity systems powered by Intel’s Itanium processor — comes with greater automation and simpler management, HP officials said. Users will be able to deploy high-bandwidth replicated servers in hours rather than days through downloads of the HP-UX 11i system software.

In addition, new software versions can now be installed online through HP’s Online Operating System Update service, which will cut in half the planned downtime that’s usually required when upgrading from older HP-UX 11i v3 releases.

The new OS, through HP’s Green Active Processors technology, also can dynamically control the power needed by processors based on workload requirements, which will reduce power costs. A feature called Disk Scrub also overwrites and erases disks, protecting sensitive data.

“This new version of HP-UX will enable customers to better handle orders for new business and reduce the costs of their technology infrastructures,” Brian Cox, director of software planning and marketing for HP’s Business Critical Systems group, said in a statement.