HP improves HP-UX for Itanium

HP last week updated its Unix operating system for the 64-bit Intel Itanium processor.

HP-UX 11i v2 for Itanium has many of the same features of HP-UX 11i v1 for PA-RISC machines. It offers nearly functional parity and binary compatibility with that version.

In addition to support for JFS 3.5 (Journaled File System), this release also includes support for Gigabit Ethernet and Gigabit Fibre, and it can dynamically resize storage components as users need them. In addition, it also supports Oracle 9i RAC environments.

It features two tools that aid the installation of security on HP-UX servers. These features are the HP-UX Bastille v2.0 and the HP Install-Time Security tool. HP-UX Bastille, which came from the open source community, is a security tool that lets systems administrators lock down security on a server before use. It lets security settings be more secure and configures an IPFilter-based firewall. IPFilter provides network address translation and firewall services. The HP Install-Time Security tool, introduced last month, lets users choose how secure their servers will be.

HP-UX 11i v2 for Itanium also supports HP-UX Partition Manager software, which allows resources to be virtualized across a server, a Serviceguard extension for SAP applications and the Network File System high-availability toolkit.

HP-UX 11i v2 is source-code-compatible with 32-bit Linux programs and binary-compatible with Linux-for-Itanium programs.

HP-UX 11i v2 for Itanium will run on servers with as many as 64 processors; later it will support 128-processor servers.

HP expects the new operating system to ship in July.