![[H]ard|Forum](/styles/hardforum/xenforo/logo_dark.png){kind=logo}
erek
[H]F Junkie
- Joined
- Dec 19, 2005
- Messages
- 10,898
From the comments below!
" I spent years migrating off HP-UX on PA-RISC, because HP decided to replace both Alpha (which they got with Compaq, who got it with DEC) and their PA-RISC with Itanium, with no regards to compatibility. There was no upgrade path, Itanium port of HP-UX was really a new OS, not to mention software. Sure, there was a lot of software, but you couldn't even copy data over, you had to run whatever export/import/migration tools with all the caveats. Not to mention custom stuff some grey-bearded wizard wrote in the 90s that works fine, but you need to rewrite it for no good reason. Having to migrate over to something completely new - that changed everything. Instead of the usual "we can buy a new HP mainframe for $2M, or buy one from someone else cheaper, but invest $1M in migrating and certifying our new environment", now it was "we need to spend $1M on the migration, let's see if it's worth going for the new $2M HP mainframe". That's when my corpo got a better offer from IBM and we moved to POWER frames. How could HP be such short-sighted? It gets better: because some really old software needed updating and recompiling, so much work has been done for portability that... it was then easier to escape from the mainframe onto your standard cheap Xeon servers. HPE servers running Intel
They're back in business, I guess? Of course they still lost a lot of money in the mean time, and the bad move 20 years ago cost them some really loyal Big Iron customers, which are now buying 10 times cheaper stuff. A win for consumers in the end Some people were stubborn and stuck with OpenVMS or HP-UX, so Itanium still exists and HPE (or rather its customers) are paying millions just to keep the fabs running. Pretty grim situation. "
" I spent years migrating off HP-UX on PA-RISC, because HP decided to replace both Alpha (which they got with Compaq, who got it with DEC) and their PA-RISC with Itanium, with no regards to compatibility. There was no upgrade path, Itanium port of HP-UX was really a new OS, not to mention software. Sure, there was a lot of software, but you couldn't even copy data over, you had to run whatever export/import/migration tools with all the caveats. Not to mention custom stuff some grey-bearded wizard wrote in the 90s that works fine, but you need to rewrite it for no good reason. Having to migrate over to something completely new - that changed everything. Instead of the usual "we can buy a new HP mainframe for $2M, or buy one from someone else cheaper, but invest $1M in migrating and certifying our new environment", now it was "we need to spend $1M on the migration, let's see if it's worth going for the new $2M HP mainframe". That's when my corpo got a better offer from IBM and we moved to POWER frames. How could HP be such short-sighted? It gets better: because some really old software needed updating and recompiling, so much work has been done for portability that... it was then easier to escape from the mainframe onto your standard cheap Xeon servers. HPE servers running Intel
They're back in business, I guess? Of course they still lost a lot of money in the mean time, and the bad move 20 years ago cost them some really loyal Big Iron customers, which are now buying 10 times cheaper stuff. A win for consumers in the end Some people were stubborn and stuck with OpenVMS or HP-UX, so Itanium still exists and HPE (or rather its customers) are paying millions just to keep the fabs running. Pretty grim situation. "