Insight

HP fast tracks virtualisation

Facing intense competition in the Unix server market where it is playing catch-up in the areas of virtualisation and clustering, HP's recent deal with Veritas will help it fulfil its long-term Unix strategy—virtualisation, manageability, high-availability (clustering) and multiple OS support, says Akhtar Pasha

Many research firms, including Gartner, have praised HP’s efforts to boost its Unix support offering by integrating elements of Veritas Storage Suite with HP Serviceguard for HP-UX. At the same time, analysts point out that more needs to be done. What’s clear is that things are looking up for HP’s Unix business. The deal with Veritas solves two pain areas that HP is facing in its Unix roadmap—first, the move to include elements of Veritas Storage Suite helps address what had been a post-merger (with Compaq) problem of HP: integrating Compaq Tru64 cluster functionality into HP-UX 11i. This has dogged HP for quite some time, and would otherwise have been available only in 2006. By abandoning that effort and offering an HP-UX/Veritas solution in its place, HP can offer Tru64 users access to a comparable clustered Unix solution.

The second area of concern is to retain Tru64 customers who are contemplating a move to Unix platforms from competitors like IBM and Sun Microsystems. Industry pundits say that while this deal speeds up the migration path for Tru64 users, it will also benefit HP-UX users due to Veritas’ cluster file management functions.

Says Agendra Kumar, country manager, Veritas Software Solutions India, “HP’s strategic alignment with Veritas for clustering file services is a welcome step in HP’s Unix roadmap, as HP would otherwise have taken a year to develop a solution. Aligning with us helps HP reduce its time-to-market. Veritas gains an additional revenue stream on the HP platform as our File System Suite and Clustering Suite will ship every time HP sells its server with HP-UX 11i.”

Where HP scores

The deal makes available the most advanced technologies from both companies in an integrated manner and with a faster time-to-market Pallab Talukdar director-Enterprise Marketing & Alliances Customer Solutions HP India Sales

HP was working on its own cluster file system that was slated for a 2006 release. With the Veritas announcement it is saying that instead of developing its own product it will integrate Veritas Cluster File System into its Virtual Server Environment (VSE). Explains Pallab Talukdar, director-enterprise marketing & alliances, customer solutions group, HP India Sales, “This lets us give a complete VSE solution in 2005 itself, accelerating our go-to-market with the complete solution stack. The Veritas Cluster Foundation Suite (FS) will also be integrated with HP’s MC/Serviceguard clustering solution.” HP was already providing a Veritas file system with HP-UX, and it has now extended this to the cluster file system as well. The company is adding value by providing multi-cluster management, virtual view visualisation and management solutions, as well as complete end-to-end support. Talukdar adds, “The deal is very important for HP, Veritas as well as for our customers as it makes available the most advanced technologies from both companies in an integrated manner and with a faster time-to-market.”

HP plans to offer the integrated solutions—Veritas Cluster FS with MC/ Serviceguard clustering solution—in HP-UX 11i that will become available in the second half of 2005. Similarly, with Oracle Real Application Clustering, customers will see a single database across multiple applications and can do better load balancing.

Catching up with competition

IBM has been talking about its sub-CPU partitioning capabilities as a competitive advantage over HP, but market analysts say that while sub-CPU partitions can increase granularity, they may not necessarily increase system utilisation, and may even have a negative impact on performance and availability. Comments Talukdar, “You cannot have dynamic logical partitioning and electrical partitioning (see box on partitioning) together as it degrades server performance in a sub-partition by 35-40 percent. The best way to dice server resources is through electrical isolation.” Customers interested in maximum isolation will probably be better off running several small, low-cost servers or larger servers in combination with partitioning.

Partitioning continuum

On the PA-RISC and Itanium 2 platforms, HP supports Virtual Partitions (vPars) and Hard Partitions (nPars). In addition to vPars and nPars, customers can make use of HP’s Process Resource Manager (PRM) and Workload Manager (WLM) solutions to further improve virtualisation. On the Itanium 2 platform, HP PRM and WLM solutions, working alone or in conjunction with electrical isolation (nPars), can actually provide better resource utilisation and greater granularity and flexibility with lower complexity, without degradation in performance. Enterprise customers have the choice of instant Capacity on Demand (iCOD). For instance, the Bombay Stock Exchange is using a mix of vPars and nPars for its trading and settlement applications.

HP still lags behind its Unix competitors in sub-portioning server CPUs. (IBM’s AIX version of Unix is already capable of running as many as ten instances of an operating system on a single processor). HP has an answer to this as well. It will have similar features as part of its High Performance Virtual Machines (HPVM) software, due in the second half of 2005.

Electrical and Dynamic Partitioning

In electrical partitioning, also called physical partitioning, partitions are divided along hardware boundaries. Processors, I/O boards, memory and interconnects are not shared. Each partition has dedicated and independent power supply, I/O and memory modules. In the case of dynamic logical partitions, the system has the same power supply, I/O board, and memory is shared. Because of this, if one element goes down, the entire server performance is affected.

akhtar@expresscomputeronline.com