Hewlett-Packard, one of the largest maker of servers in the world and the biggest supplier of Intel Itanium-based servers for mission-critical applications, said that in future it will work significantly more closely with Microsoft Corp. and Linux community in order to ensure that appropriate operating systems support mission-critical technologies that can take advantage of HP's hardware. Still, HP-UX will remain the main part of HP's platform.

"What we are going to be leveraging is Linux and Windows. We have existing relations with Microsoft and for scalable mission-critical platforms we debuted on [Intel] Itanium when we had Windows for Itanium. [...] We want to partner with Microsoft and perhaps even more interestingly partner with the Linux community because that's how we think we can complement the existing business," said Kirk Bresniker, chief technology officer of business critical systems at HP, in an interview with The Inquirer.

Last November HP already HP announced “Odyssey”, a project that promises to redefine the future of mission-critical computing with a development roadmap that will unify Unix and x86 server architectures to bring industry-leading availability, increased performance and uncompromising client choice to a single platform.

HP’s new development roadmap includes ongoing innovations to HP Integrity servers, HP NonStop systems and the HP-UX and OpenVMS operating systems. The roadmap also includes delivering blades with Intel Xeon processors for the HP Superdome 2 enclosure (code-named “DragonHawk”) and the scalable c-Class blade enclosures (code-named “HydraLynx”), while fortifying Windows and Linux environments with innovations from HP-UX within the next two years.

"If you look at where most industry analysts are predicting where the market will go they see more and more of a heavy adoption of industry standard x86 environments for Windows and Linux to support more and more mission critical workloads. So if the industry and our customers are going to start adopting that, we are going to help them address that one way or another," said Jim Losink, cross portfolio marketing manager at HP.

As operating systems like Windows and Linux are maturing, it is inevitable that many mission-critical workloads will run on machines powered by those OSs as they are naturally more affordable than proprietary servers featuring proprietary operating systems and special chips like Intel Itanium. Both Intel and HP understand the trend and although will continue to support Itanium towards the end of the decade, they are getting ready to incorporate typical Xeon chips into business critical machines.

"We were very encouraged by HP’s announcement to incorporate Xeon into their proven mission-critical Superdome 2 environments. Customers buy Itanium-based systems for its support of resilient Unix operating systems, along with the combination of scalable enterprise performance and exceptional system reliability. By including future Xeon-based blades into the currently shipping Superdome 2 platforms, customers can confidently deploy Itanium today knowing they have infrastructure investment protection, choice and flexibility for their mission critical environment in the future. Customers will be able to run Microsoft Windows or Linux on Xeon and get full mission-critical capabilities side-by-side with their traditional HP-UX on Itanium workloads," explained Radoslaw Walczyk, a spokesman for Intel.

Tags: HP, Windows, Linux, HP-UX, Xeon, Itanium, Intel, Odyssey, Red Hat