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HP-UX 11i v3 Update 3: Simplified Management

Increased energy efficiency, cost savings and accelerated time-to-solution
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Update 3
overview

Performance unleashed

Simplified management

Greater protection
HP-UX 11i v3 Update 3 gives system administrators a push-button, easy way to do things that would take weeks otherwise and enables new control over important resources.
New with Update 3:
» Automated optimisation for up to 50% faster application performance
» 10 times faster response to security bulletins
» Fast & efficient provisioning, simplified testing with Dynamic Root Disk
» Up to 10% energy cost savings with idling processors
» Introducing ktracer: reduce performance bottleneck troubleshooting from weeks to days and days to minutes
» Cost savings with Global Instant Capacity integrated with Global Workload Manager
» Kernel limits expanded for group membership and base system file size

Automated optimisation with up to 50% performance increase

Tuning a UNIX system for maximum performance for huge database and ERP environments is hard. Only experienced system administrators attempt it. In fact, many customers tell us they simply don’t have time to tune their UNIX systems and they don’t like paying for a consultant to do it. HP listened.
Now, HP-UX 11i v3 delivers two ways to automate performance optimisation with a single command. Each turns weeks of tuning into minutes – with optimal results.
  • Tune-N-Tools: run a single script to optimise an HP-UX 11i v3 system for Oracle, SAP and similar applications.
  • Locality-Optimised Resource Alignment (LORA): turn on LORA for continual alignment of NUMA memory, cores and applications on HP Integrity mid-range servers and higher.

10 times faster response to security bulletins with Software Assistant

HP-UX 11i v3 delivers a single-pane multi-system view of all security bulletins, together with the recommended fix, with enhancements to Software Assistant (SWA), integrated with Systems Insight Manager. That can shorten the time from bulletin to response by ten times.
On average, major UNIX vendors issue about 100 security bulletins a year, give or take 20%, to help our customers stay protected from new threats. Each security bulletin may or may not be relevant to each of your systems. But you better know which ones apply to which systems and take appropriate action quickly when merited!
For those of you not using the latest release of SWA, count your mouse-clicks into multiple individual bulletin notices, individual system relevance reports and patch download sites for a year. Count the ticks of the clock and add it up. We think you’ll appreciate it when we tell you our measures show that single, at-a-glance views of multi-systems reports achieve about 10 times faster response to security bulletins, all year long.

Fast & efficient provisioning, simplified testing with DRD

With HP-UX 11i v3 Update 3, we have enhanced Dynamic Root Disk (DRD) with two key benefits:
  • Fast, efficient provisioning through easy replication of the root volume group of one system for distribution to other like systems. 'Like systems' means between Virtual Machines or between Integrity Server blades with Virtual Connect.
  • Simplified, more accurate testing through using DRD to set up a test system identical to a production system, reducing test machine setup times and producing more reliable testing results with no impact to the production system
Dynamic Root Disk (DRD) reduces planned downtime associated with patching and product installation on HP-UX 11i v3 systems by enabling you to perform system maintenance while the system is still running. By creating an inactive clone of the root volume, maintenance can be performed on the clone while the system is still running.
The only downtime required is the time to reboot to the clone, which results in up to 60% less downtime per maintenance cycle. In addition, the DRD clone can easily be utilised for fast system recovery, if needed.

Introducing ktracer                                     

HP introduces ktracer, a tool for application and device driver developers to instrument the HP-UX 11i v3 kernel running on HP Integrity servers – in order to identify performance bottlenecks and unexpected process behaviour.
Use ktracer to reduce troubleshooting from weeks to days, days to minutes!
Key features of ktracer:
  • Supports over 40,000 trace points
  • Runs with low performance overheads – zero when not in use
  • Generates rich, script-ready reports in multiple output forms
  • Ease of use, with user’s choice of common scripting languages
Running for over two decades on HP systems and in custom engagements on customers’ systems, ktracer is proven-reliable for production systems. HP ktracer is integrated with version 5 of HP Calliper, HP-UX 11i’s proven performance measurement and analysis tool for application instrumentation.

Up to 10% energy cost savings for idling processors

HP-UX 11i v3 Update 3 enables energy savings of up to 10% of a system’s total energy consumption on Montvale-based Integrity servers, when processors are idling.
Taking full advantage of Intel® Itanium® processors, HP-UX 11i v3 now provides a new tuneable ‘pwr_idle_ctl’ that lets you control the power consumption in idle processors.
This new tuneable can be turned on to settings from 1 to 5, where 1 represents the least power saving and 5 represents the maximum power saving in idle processors.
Flexibility gives you the control – you determine the balance between energy savings and having your processors revived to contribute to your workloads.

Cost savings with GiCAP and Global Workload Manager

Mission-critical virtualisation includes the concept of flexibility to move software licences and hardware usage right to available resources to meet workloads demands. HP delivers that capability with Global Instant Capacity (GiCAP).
HP has enhanced GiCAP by integrating it with Global Workload Manager (gWLM), to automate the process of policy-based re-allocation of resources to idle capacity on other servers. GiCAP facilitates full mobility with configuration cost savings associated with not having to buy more licences that you would otherwise need for processors used in a gWLM resource re-allocation. Coupled with Temporary Instant Capacity (TiCAP), capacity to handle spikes can be pooled and applied to any server where and when needed automatically. Combined GiCAP and gWLM keep your applications running at the levels you establish with minimal costs.

Rapid response to business needs

HP means to be easy to do business with and GiCAP exemplifies that. Allowing policy-based re-allocation of licences, GiCAP is dynamic and does not require HP intervention. Your systems should respond to your business needs and GiCAP plus gWLM enables that in a matter of a few minutes. Any solution that requires contacting the vendor has no hope of reaching that degree of on-demand flexibility.
GiCAP and gWLM management tools are built on top of HP Systems Insight Manager – HP's leadership management solution – with Instant Capacity Manager allowing graphic monitoring of all iCAP resources.

Kernel limits expanded for group membership and base system file size

The maximum number of supplementary groups that can be associated with a user or process has been made a tuneable parameter in Update 3 to HP-UX 11i v3. Previously, the maximum limit was fixed by the constant NGROUPS, whose value is 20. The system administrator can adjust the limit to values higher than the previous maximum by invoking the kctune command to increase the tuneable ngroups_max. This enhancement allows users – and processes running on their behalf – to gain access permissions based on their membership in an expanded number of groups.
The system base page size, now tuneable, can be increased to 64 kilobytes, up from 4096 bytes. The larger base page sizes allow memory to be managed more efficiently, resulting in a decrease in kernel memory usage. This can also result in an increase in system performance for some workloads.

One of the most exciting advantages we gained from adopting HP Integrity servers and HP-UX 11i v3 is that we have sufficient infrastructure capacity and performance to triple our number of branches and transaction volume comfortably – without making additional IT investments.
We expected 30 percent more performance, but our performance gain was an additional 10 percent above what we anticipated.
Hakan Dombekci, Systems and Operations Manager, Tekstilbank
'For over 20 years, Ingres and HP have provided a superior platform for many of our customer’s business critical applications. The latest release of HP-UX 11i v3 combines improved performance, scalability and security along with improved management tools.
The excellent binary compatibility of this update allows Ingres to make it available to our customers very quickly.
―Deb Woods, Vice President, Product Management, Ingres Corporation