Last night, HP hosted a media preview for the launch of HP-UX 11i v3 (what an exciting name!). Here's in summary what virtualisation director Nick van der Zweep had to say about HP's Unix operating system new enterprise release:
- applications will run on average 30% faster without a recompile, thanks to improvements to the I/O stack, the Java execution environment and threading in HP-UX
- support for 100 zeta-bytes (what is that?) of attached storage
- "hot-swapability" of CPUs, memory and I/Os
- support of dying processors PA-Risc and Itanium, but no x86
- last but not least, Sun's Java will perform better on HP-UX than on Solaris (no figures though!)

The Dutchman also urged the crowd to find roadmap information on Sun's Solaris as detailed as this ridicule HP's single page document that "details" subsequent releases of HP-UX until at least 2010! Another funny soundbyte: HP is shipping more Sun Solaris on x86 than Sun is on it's own servers. Finally, here's the link to our short video of Van der Zweep's presentation.