HP’s effort for the next generation of BCS systems is wrapped up in the Project Odyssey banner. Fink noted that Odyssey includes ongoing continued investments in the HP-UX, Non-Stop and OpenVMS platforms. There is also a second component to Odyssey which is about bringing similar capabilities to x86 based systems. One of the x86 components is codenamed DragonHawk and it aims to bring Superdome Itanium, HP-UX type capabilities to x86 on Linux.
“What happens is people will sometimes have a tendency to focus on that (Dragonhawk) piece as it’s the new piece,” HP Senior Vice President and General Manager of Business Critical Systems (BCS), Martin Fink, told InternetNews.
One such focus on DragonHawk came in an interview with ServerWatchearlier this month. Scott Farrand, vice president of Industry Standard Servers and Software in the Enterprise Group at HP at the time said that HP’s go forward strategy for mission-critical systems is shifting to an x86-based world.
Fink however stressed that Odyssey is about more than just x86.
“The reality is we very much want to continue to deliver our mission critical capabilities in the other world,” Fink said.
When it comes to positioning Unix versus Linux, Fink stressed that he stays away from conversations on one operating system being better than the other. He noted that he tries to have conversations around scale up versus scale out and in his experience different customers have different views on which approach works best.
As well, the decision is often made based on what skill sets are present at a particular customer deployment.
“It’s really hard for me to give an answer, that in a particular situation I recommend Linux and scale out and in another I recommend Unix and scale up,” Fink said. “In reality it’s a conversation with the customer and it depends on the culture of the customer, environment, staff training and all sorts of things like that, so there is no one real right answer.”
Read the full story at ServerWatch:
HP Pushes Forward on Itanium Unix for Scale Out Computing
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
