Best Unix?

[Jerry Feldman]

The Alpha is, unfortunately, a niche product. It has become the workhorse 
for some major ISPs, and also in high performance technical computing. 
Tru64 also scales well up to many CPUs. Clustering comes from the VMS 
heritage, and there is no other high end competitor. Unfortunately, Compaq 
lost some of its best clustering engineers to Mission Critical Linux. 

On the other hand, the HP systems were successfully installed in major 
mainstream IT datacenters. With HP having some good high end boxes, like 
the Superdome, the only way Compaq could continue to compete was to pour 
money into the Alpha chip. It just became (enter the bean counters) too 
expensive. Compag (and Digital before that) had been working with Intel on 
porting Tru64 to what is now the Itanium. Last summer, before the HP deal,  
they made a deal with Intel, that effectively transferred the next 
generation Alpha chip people to Intel. If the merger did not go through, 
then there might have been Tru64 on Itanium with the current HPTC teams 
providing the box technologies. With the HP deal, Tru64 becomes a casualty, 
but HP-UX (should) become much better. 

The downside is that now that HP is effectively the number 2 computer maker 
behind IBM, they are IBMs primary target. In the past, the number 2 guy has 
gotten squashed. There is a long list. Honeywell (now Bull), Burroughs (now 
Unisys), RCA(I think now part of Unisys), GE (became part of Honeywell). 


On 19 Jun 2002 at 7:52, Wizard wrote:

> Well, I just read the roadmap at:
> http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/07may02b.htm
> and am glad to see that HP is specifically recognizing the clustering and
> file system capabilities of Tru64. Specifically, I believe that the
> clustering under Tru64 is fantastic. As far as the other features that made
> Tru64 a win in my book is it's stability under load. I don't know why this
> is, but I assume that HP will take a long look at it.
> 
> Grant M.
> 
> > Tru64 will remain supported until after the last Alpha is sold. That is
> > about 10 years up the road. There are many features of Tru64 that will be
> > migrated to HP-UX. The major pieces have been publicly stated in the
> > published product roadmaps.
> 
> 
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--
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Associate Director
Boston Linux and Unix user group
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