Hewlett-Packard Co has announced that it will be working with PA- RISC licensee Hitachi Ltd on mainframe functionality for future versions of its HP-UX Unix implementation (CI No 3,084). The announcement doesn’t bode well for the general availability of such features in the so-called Big E – for Enterprise – Unix initiative on which HP is working with the Santa Cruz Operation. The company says it has no current plans to include the work in the future three-dimensional architecture 3DA Unix that will result from the initiative, which is primarily aimed at the combined Intel Corp-Hewlett-Packard Merced chip. Hitachi is one of two PA-RISC partners with co-development agreements that pre-date HP’s year-old 3DA initiative (CI No 2,855) – the other being NEC Corp. The companies say the agreement marks the beginning of a new phase in the long-term partnership. Hewlett-Packard acknowledges Hitachi’s superior skills in the fields of configurability, flexibility and high availability, and wants it to bring its mainframe-style experience to bear on HP-UX. One example will be the ability to keep applications and databases available during system reconfigurations. Hitachi already has a Unix superset of mainframe functionality it calls Osiris which is built upon a foundation of OSF/1, the Open Software Foundation kernel from which key components of HP-UX are also derived. The first results from the initial phase of the project are to appear in releases of HP-UX set for later this year. Hewlett-Packard has promised a full-blown 64-bit HP-UX 11.0 by mid-year. An 11.x release will support the introduction of PA-8500 and Merced-based systems, but the full next generation Unix based upon the 3DA architecture won’t debut until 1998 or beyond. Not until that HP- UX 12.0 release will the company provide the first 3DA-based code dump – including its 64-bit work – to the Santa Cruz Operation – enough time for others to be offering just the same type of facilities.
