Our advancements translate to your higher ROI

Before you upgrade your HP-UX 11i environment, you want to know why it's worth the time and effort. HP-UX 11i v3 exceeds the prior release's advantages in several substantial ways that combine to drive up your ROI when you upgrade. If you're still running v1 or v2, see what you're missing! Find the quantified benefits of upgrading below, and the technical advancements that explain why.

The ABCs of payback are so fast and the long-term savings are so great, you can’t afford not to
upgrade from HP 9000 to Integrity servers with HP-UX 11i v3.

Quantified benefits: upgrade to v3

First, if your HP-UX system is on support, you can upgrade at no additional cost. Upgrading to v3 gets you the latest OE bundles.

• »Find out how you can gain up to 81% incremental software value and how you can reduce software support costs in two ways – lower OE support prices, and eliminating support for stand-alone software if it's bundled in the new v3 OEs

That's in the single-system upgrade case: if you consolidate multiple older systems into fewer new systems, your advantages multiply. Next, HP-UX 11i v3 functionality is enhanced in ways that drive down costs, while increasing productivity for end users, system administrators and software developers.

In February 2009, TechWise Research, Inc. published results from its research with 130 customers of varying sizes from the U.S. and 13 European countries working across a wide range of industries. The chart and summary benefits above are from the TechWise paper:

Technical advancements explain customers' improved ROI

The benefits quantified above reflect users' experience with early releases of v3, which first shipped in February '07. To keep your systems running at their best, HP recommends updating to the latest v3 release. HP releases bundled updates about every six months.

• »See what's new in the latest update

Everything here is what HP has engineered into HP-UX 11i v3 that is not available on v2 or v1. This isn't everything that's hot in HP-UX 11i v3. HP engineers a great many enhancements that benefit v2 customers, even though we released our final functional update to v2 in 2007. Instant capacity, single-pane-of-glass management with SIM and SMH, all things security, to name a few, are key HP-UX 11i benefits but are generally equivalent across HP-UX 11i releases.

Cost savings: simply spend less

Upgrading to v3 gets you the latest OE bundles:

• »Find out how you can gain up to 81% incremental software value

Plus, you can reduce software support costs in two ways – lower OE support prices, and eliminating support for stand-alone software if it's bundled in the new v3 OEs. Ok, this is packaging and pricing, not technology advancements, but we didn't want you to miss that.

• »Read how you can reduce energy costs with HP-UX 11i v3 power management – control cells, I/O and active and idle processors to lower your electric bills!

Performance

HP-UX 11i v3 is faster than v2. Also, v2 set records for best results across the range of workloads tested in industry-standard benchmarks, now trumped by v3 benchmarks! On average, v3 delivers a 30% increase in application performance compared to v2 – but customers report even higher benefits! That's due to kernel optimisation: With v3, HP optimised the HP-UX 11i kernel for HP Integrity servers' Itanium processor architecture. The optimisation benefits different applications differently: test your workload on an HP-UX 11i v3 in an HP Solution Centre near you! Memory File System on HP-UX 11i v3 is a new implementation that is twice as fast as the v2 MemFS, accelerating database and ERP performance through operations performance on data in memory, versus on disk. Mass Storage Stack accelerates access to data on disk, with native multipathing and load balancing, as well as by eliminating SAN port congestion by increasing the port queue depth. (By the way, you can buy fewer disks when you get more performance from existing ones.)

Availability: driving down planned and unplanned downtime

• Self-healing – where HP-UX 11i v3 fixes problems so you don't have to – applies in v3 to failed I/O paths and devices and PCI errors.
• Dynamic nPars – enhancing our electrically isolated hard partitions – enables system administrators to reconfigure nPars without rebooting.
• PCI online deletion eliminates reboots associated with those configuration changes.
• HP presses on to make HP-UX 11i system tunables dynamic, eliminating the need to reboot when administrators change settings. Of the total, 73% of the tunables are now dynamic, up from 50% with v2 and 15% with v1.
• HP-UX Swapoff enables the removal of disks from a running system, eliminating another reboot.
• Logical Volume Manager (LVM) supports online provisioning changes. In the event of a Serviceguard cluster failover, data re-synch is much faster because we re-synch in parallel in v3, and we implemented Mirror Write Cache to reduce the amount of data to be re-synched.
• Dynamic Root Disk enables online upgrades within HP-UX 11i v3 (e.g. Update 3 to Update 4), leaving only the reboot time left as downtime. For an HP Integrity rx3600 server, that's a downtime reduction of about 50%.
• Preventative measures – when you care enough to cluster and use RAID, you care about increased redundancy. The number of mirrored copies of data is up from 3 to 6, and the number of cluster nodes that can concurrently access mirrored data is increased from 2 to 16.

Simplified management: driving down the time and effort

• Power management comes with HP-UX 11i v3, with controls to reduce energy costs from active and idle processors, I/O cards, and entire cells.
• Mass Storage Stack simplifies storage management with SAN device auto-detection and configuration. HP-UX 11i v3 also ships with an 'erase-in-place' disk sanitiser for convenient DoD-compliant hard drive erasure to render data unrecoverable, and leave the drive ready for re-use.
• Locality-optimised Resource Alignment (LORA) for cell-based servers automatically and continually aligns CPU, NUMA memory and applications to minimise latency and optimise performance.
• Tune-N-Tools is a run-once script that assigns values to HP-UX 11i v3 tunables, tested to optimise a system for typical UNIX workloads, like databases and ERP applications. LORA and Tune-n-Tools get you pretty close to full system performance potential, without the hand-tuning (and years of experience to learn how to hand-tune!).
• For Montvale processor-based Integrity servers, HP-UX 11i v3 delivers Automated Processor Recover (APR).

• »Read how the new HP-UX 11i v3 Operating Environments trump the v2 OEs

V3 OEs have more software and the software in highest demand by today's mission-critical virtualisation installations. At installation and update time, one kit and installation procedure brings the entire OE software set up to date.

Flexibility with partitioning

Integrity Virtual Machines – sub-CPU partitioning, available for HP-UX 11i v2 and v3, has these advantages over v3: online guest migration, CPU capping, the hpvmsar tool for performance analysis, and size – up to 8 virtual CPUs. Dynamic vPars resource movement for CPUs is available for all HP-UX 11i releases – but only v3 enables memory migration. Dynamic nPartitions, famous for avoiding downtime, also increases flexibility for system administrators who want to reconfigure online.

Virtually unlimited scalability

Expanded system and cluster limits in multiple dimensions deliver scalability far beyond what's in use today and even projected into future years. Glance at the charts below. These are tested – not architectural – limits. Let us know if you find any technical limit that has the potential to impede your growth in the next several years.

Scalability: Expanded kernel

Supported maximums

* Pre-enabled for further expansion via HWE
New! = Update 3 enhancement

Scalability: Enhanced mass storage

Abbreviations used:
LUNs: Logical unit number
HBA: Host bus adapter

Scalability: Logical volumes

* Available with HP-UX 11i v3 Update 2 and later
Come to HP-UX 11i v3 for the highest return on your UNIX operating system investment.

• »Consider a transition from HP 9000 servers