HP has unveiled an update to its HP-UX operating system. It vowed that it will continue to issue updates for many years to come, killing any rumors that competitors are spreading about its allegedly pending demise.

The software still runs a fair amount of the world's mission critical computer systems. HP developers have extensively tweaked the new 11i v3 version to boost its performance.

You won't hear us utter a single bad word about HP-UX. The software for years has done a splendid job at running really boring yet important applications. These are systems that companies typically won't touch until flames are bursting out of them.

17 Feb 2007

But the company at a launch event earlier this week in San Francisco pushed its luck when it tried to pitch the software against Sun's Solaris operating system. The "we're not Linux, but open source just the same" Solaris software has found a strong following with companies that install it on industry standard x86 servers (many of which come from HP).

HP-UX doesn't even support x86 servers – it's limited to PA-RISC (which has been all but discontinued) and Itanium processors.

HP-UX is to software what mainframes are to the server market: really important its installed base, and utterly irrelevant to the rest of the world.

HP's superdome, as exciting as an IBM mainframe and not nearly selling as well.