This white paper discusses migrating from Itanium/HP-UX platforms to x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server platforms. It argues that x86/SUSE Linux offers greater flexibility, interoperability, and ability to take advantage of innovations like virtualization and cloud computing at lower costs than Itanium/HP-UX. The paper cites declining market share and support for Itanium as reasons for uncertainty around its future. It provides a detailed comparison of features available on SUSE Linux versus HP-UX and argues that SUSE Linux now meets or exceeds HP-UX in performance, reliability, and scalability. The paper concludes that migrating to x86/SUSE Linux is the best path for data center modernization.

1. White Paper
Data Center Modernization
The Case for Migrating from
Itanium/HP-UX to x86/SUSE
Linux Enterprise Server
®
Table of Contents
page
Modernize Your Data Center by Migrating
from Itanium/HP-UX to x86/SUSE Linux
Enterprise Server. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2
D
ata Center Modernization—Why and How. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
S
USE Linux Enterprise Server versus Itanium/HP-UX . . . . 4
Summary and Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

2. Data Center Modernization White Paper
The Case for Migrating from Itanium/HP-UX to x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Modernize Your Data Center by
Migrating from Itanium/HP-UX to
x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
®
Discover how migrating from Itanium/HP-UX to x86/
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server can provide you with
greater innovation and flexibility and lower costs in
your data center—now and in the future.
®
Data Center Modernization—Why and How
To stay competitive often requires modernizing your data
cen­ er. A “modern” data center infrastructure allows you to
t
take advantage of new, ongoing innovations and to:
Reduce data center costs by decreasing software licensing,
maintenance and hardware costs
Increase utilization of data center resources by consolidating
resources, implementing cloud computing and supporting
application/workload mobility
Improve performance and energy efficiency by using new
hardware
Increase responsiveness to address market changes more
rapidly and improve business agility
Reduce corporate costs and improve employee productivity
through strategies such as BYOD (bring your own device)
Improve security and management by addressing any gaps
caused by increased use of mobile devices for business
Support a new wave of applications including new solutions
for mobile devices, cloud computing, Big Data and social
media
Where do you start? Perhaps the two most important areas
of data center modernization are implementing virtualization
2
and choosing the “right” operating system/hardware server
platforms. Virtualization enables you to consolidate multiple
workloads often running on individual servers onto significantly fewer virtualization host servers, reducing data center
expenditures substantially. Virtualization also leads to flexible networks and enables you to move compute resources,
whatever they are, to better respond to demand. Without
virtualization your speed in provisioning and de-provisioning
resources is greatly constrained.
Selecting an operating system/hardware server platform for
your data center has long-term consequences. The selection
process must take into account not only features of both
the operating system and the hardware platform on which
it runs, but the ability of the platform to enable and support
your future business requirements. This is especially the case
with Itanium/HP-UX.
x86/SUSE Enterprise Linux Server offers the
interoperability, openness to innovation, higher
performance and lower cost necessary for success
today and tomorrow.

3. The Decline of Itanium/HP-UX
Historically, Itanium/HP-UX has been a competitive UNIX
platform even though Itanium’s original performance was
disappointing compared to other RISC processors.* However,
in recent years, uncertainty around Intel’s support for Itanium
processors—as well as the uncertainty about Oracle and Red
Hat’s continuing use of Itanium for their offerings—has generated questions about the stability of Itanium long term and
helped draw HP-UX’s market share down sharply.
Specifically, in March 2011, Oracle announced discontinuation of development on Itanium. Prior to this, Red Hat and
Microsoft had announced plans to drop support for Itanium.
An HP lawsuit against Oracle in the latter half of 2011 resulted
in Oracle being ordered to maintain support for Itanium/
HP-UX. By this time, market interest in Itanium/HP-UX had
waned and orders for Itanium/HP-UX were either delayed or
canceled. HP ended up paying Intel several hundred million
dollars to keep Itanium afloat. Today HP has about 95 percent
of the Itanium market share, primarily running HP-UX. As
the use of Itanium diminishes, HP has experienced an annual
double-digit market share decline, beginning in 2008.
Other issues also dog the platform. Support and maintenance contracts for Itanium/HP-UX platforms are expensive.
Itanium server performance has suffered greatly, especially
on a per-core basis. In addition, ISVs are dropping support for
applications on Itanium/HP-UX. Lack of innovation around
Itanium/HP-UX also limits your ability to take advantage of
many new technologies, such as virtualization, cloud computing and new storage technologies that reduce costs and
make you more responsive to market changes.
What is the alternative?
platforms used to run mission-critical backend database applications. Now, that is no longer the case.
Intel has moved (and continues to move) several RAS and
scale-up features from Itanium processors to its x86 Xeon
processors. In addition, HP has incorporated many of the
RAS and other availability features from its Itanium-based
Superdome 2 computers running HP-UX into its ProLiant
computers such as the DL 980, which uses multi-core Xeon
processors. These types of enhancements have made SUSE
Linux Enterprise Server running on HP’s x86-based servers
very competitive with its Itanium/HP-UX platforms in terms
of RAS, I/O speed, processor performance, resiliency and
more. In other words, today, the price, performance and reliability of x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server platforms now
meet and exceed the capabilities of Itanium/HP-UX.
Just as important, many of the innovative ideas used to modernize data centers are built for Linux and x86 servers, and
virtually none of them are associated with Itanium/HP-UX.
Migrating to or staying with Itanium/HP-UX limits your ability
to modernize your data center and totally locks you in to HP.
As a result, enterprises are migrating from Itanium/HP-UX to
x86/Linux platforms running new multi-core, scale-up x86
servers such as the HP DL980 Xeon 7500 series servers and
x86 AMD and Intel servers from IBM such as the IBM System
x3690. In fact, for many corporations with an HP-UX installed
base, migrating legacy Itanium and PA-RISC/HP-UX systems
to x86/Linux—especially SUSE Linux Enterprise Server—is
the centerpiece of data center modernization. Today x86/
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server offers the features/technologies of RISC/UNIX, plus faster performance, greater interoperability and openness to innovation all at a lower cost, as
shown in Table 1 on the following page.
Innovation Fuels the Rise of Linux
Until recently, x86 servers running Linux lacked the performance, RAS (reliability, availability and scalability), scale-up
capabilities and workload management of Itanium/HP-UX
__________
* The Itanium architecture is technically not RISC; it is an EPIC
(explicitly parallel instruction computing) architecture. However,
this paper groups Itanium/HP-UX with the RISC/ UNIX platforms.
www.suse.com
Itanium/HP-UX is viewed as having an extremely
uncertain roadmap, even for the next few years,
due to lack of market interest in both Itanium and
HP-UX, and most important, lack of interest in Itanium
by Intel.
3

4. Data Center Modernization White Paper
The Case for Migrating from Itanium/HP-UX to x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server versus Itanium/HP-UX
Table 1 below provides a detailed comparison of the features and technologies available in x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise
Server and Itanium/HP-UX.
Table 1: Comparison of Features/Technologies Available in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Itanium/HP-UX
Technologies
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
HP-UX
ile system
F
Ships with a number of different file systems from which to
choose, including Btrfs, Ext3 (default for SUSE Linux Enterprise
Server), Ext2, ReiserFS, XFS (open source version) and OCFS2.
Each has advantages and disadvantages. See: http://doc.
opensuse.org/products/draft/SLES/SLES-storage_sd_draft/
filesystems.html
The VERITAS File System (or VxFS), called “JFS” and “Online JFS”
in HP-UX, is an extent-based file system. Originally developed by
VERITAS Software, VxFS is the primary file system of the HP-UX
operating system.
VxFS is also supported on AIX, Linux, Solaris and OpenSolaris.
It is comparable to other UNIX file systems such as Oracle Sun ZFS.
A file system comparison table is located at: https://www.suse.
com/de-de/products/server/technical-information
redictive
P
self-healing
This functionality requires hardware support to be fully effective.
SUSE is working with all major hardware vendors, especially
IBM and Intel, to optimize integration of the hardware and the
operating system.
Automatic mitigation of software/hardware errors: admin
n
­ otifications, isolation/deactivation of faulty components and
guided repair.
Proactive notification: technologies such as MCELog help
administrators to get informed early about upcoming hardware
issues that might impact the stability of the operating system
and the applications.
ynamic tracing
D
framework
SystemTap. A scripting language and tool for dynamically
i
­nstrumenting running production Linux operating systems.
HP offers a tool called Caliper, which is a general-purpose
p
­ erformance analysis tool for applications, processes and systems.
HP Caliper allows administrators and developers to understand
the performance and execution of an application and to identify
ways to improve its runtime performance.
ecurity/
S
certification
Common Criteria Certification EAL 4+
HP-UX 11i has been submitted for evaluation to the Common
Criteria Controlled Access Protection Profile evaluation assurance
level EAL4.
Upcoming FIPS certification for the openSSL module.
irtualization
V
Interoperability with leading hypervisors:
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server directly supports Xen and
KVM, and VMware ESX runs on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
All three support Linux and Windows as guests on SUSE
Linux Enterprise Server virtualization hosts.
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server can be run as a guest operating
­
system in virtual environments created using VMware vSphere,
Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer.
Linux Containers (see below) is another virtualization
t
­ echnology.
ontainers
C
Linux Containers (LXC) is an operating system-level virtualization
method for running multiple isolated Linux systems (containers)
on a single control host.
Itanium/HP-UX 11i v3 supports hardware partitions (nPars) and
virtual partitions (vPars) specific to HP-UX and Itanium-based
Integrity servers. nPars provide complete electrical isolation
b
­ etween partitions.
Also provides HP Integrity Virtual Machines, similar to Xen, etc.,
and HP-UX Containers, a technology similar to Linux Containers
and Oracle Solaris Containers.
HP-UX virtualization technology does not interoperate with other
common virtualization technologies except in a limited fashion
using HP Integrity Virtual Machines.
HP-UX Containers provide an environment for consolidating
multiple workloads within a single image of HP-UX 11i v3.
Similar to Linux Containers and Oracle Solaris Containers.
LXC relies on the Linux kernel cgroups functionality that became
available in version 2.6.24, developed as part of LXC.
In principle, both Linux Containers and HP-UX Containers are
similar. They are virtualization technologies at the application
level, so they are “above” the operating system kernel. Unlike
hypervisor-based virtualization, they do not add an additional
software layer.
Continued on next page
4

5. Technologies
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
HP-UX
lusters
C
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP 2 with High Availability
Extension lets you implement mission-critical Linux clusters
using OCFS2, a shared-disk, POSIX-compliant generic cluster
file system.
HP Serviceguard: a solid cluster technology with features and
functionality similar to Solaris Clusters
Service Pack 2 offers new functionality that makes it even
easier to set up and use the integrated suite of robust, opensource clustering technologies in SUSE Linux Enterprise High
Availability Extension.
HP Serviceguard can be purchased as part of the HP-UX High
Availability Operating Environment (HA-OE), the Data Center
O
­ perating Environment (DC-OE), or as a standalone product
for HP-UX 11i v3.
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server supports other cluster products,
including Veritas Cluster Server and HP Serviceguard.
ardware platforms
H
supported
x86, x86-64, POWER, Itanium, IBM mainframe
Itanium (IA-64)
loud computing
C
SUSE Cloud is built on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and is
based on the popular OpenStack project. SUSE Cloud is also
integrated with SUSE Manager and SUSE Studio™ to provide
management and application development for SUSE Cloud
as well as other cloud platforms.
HP has two basic cloud offerings: HP Cloud Service and HP
C
­ loudSystem. HP Cloud Service is built around OpenStack.
Various third-party cloud management tools, such as Aeolus
and ConVirt, are also available to manage SUSE Cloud-based
clouds. SUSE Cloud interoperates with other cloud platforms
built around OpenStack.
SUSE Cloud runs on various Linux platforms and is integrated
with Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS).
HP CloudSystem is not so much a platform as a collection of
intersecting HP products and roadmaps to get cloud capabilities.
Some of these HP products are basically old HP offerings stamped
“cloud.”
HP CloudSystem supports both HP Integrity servers (Itaniumbased) and x86 servers. It supports Windows, Linux and HP-UX
operating systems, and VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V, KVM
and HP Integrity virtual machines.
If you buy into HP’s cloud strategy, you will almost certainly have
to hire HP’s professional services group to either implement
clouds or, at least, help implement clouds.
RAS
Combination of new multi-core, scale-up AMD/Intel hardware
married with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server compares favorably
with Itanium/HP-UX with respect to RAS. RAS can no longer
be used to differentiate Itanium/HP-UX and x86/SUSE Linux
Enterprise Server.
Itanium/HP-UX is still one of the leading UNIX platforms for RAS.
SV enthusiasm
I
x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is way ahead of Itanium/
HP-UX in terms of ISV enthusiasm. ISVs use Linux as the
d
­ evelopment platform and port to Itanium/HP-UX only if
there is sufficient demand.
Itanium/HP-UX market share is dropping at a fast pace, leading
ISVs to port to Itanium/HP-UX only when absolutely necessary.
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server has more than 10,000 ISV
a
­ pplications certified.
igh Performance
H
Computing (HPC)
Linux dominates the Top500 List of the world’s largest supercomputers with 94 percent of the supercomputers running
Linux. And SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is running on many
of them.
HPC business applications, referred to as “crossover” HPC
applications, also run on x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
High-performance computers running crossover applications
are smaller than the supercomputers. They are oriented toward
companies such as financial service companies that have
a
­ pplications that would take 12 – 15 hours to run on a small
office computer, but can run in 10 – 15 minutes on a small highperformance computer in a cluster format using commodity
x86 servers.
Itanium/HP-UX used to be a leader in the HPC area. Today,
Itanium/HP-UX has only a single system on the Top500 list.
Its performance on a per core basis (based on SPEC processor
benchmarks) has dropped significantly below that of x86 multicore servers from AMD and Intel running SUSE Linux Enterprise
Server.
Crossover HPC applications can run on Itanium/HP-UX, but the
cost of an Itanium/HP-UX platform would be almost prohibitive.
Continued on next page
www.suse.com
5

6. Data Center Modernization White Paper
The Case for Migrating from Itanium/HP-UX to x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Technologies
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
HP-UX
nnovation
I
No contest: x86/Linux is at the center of innovation for technologies used to modernize data centers.
The only innovation around Itanium/HP-UX, if any exists, would
be by HP. No external innovation is happening.
ost
C
x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server platforms are a fraction of the
cost of Itanium/HP-UX platforms. The big difference is the cost
of the Itanium servers.
The cost of HP-UX 11i v3 varies depending on the operating
environment (OE) and the Itanium-based Integrity server used.
HP-UX 11i v3 on older Integrity servers is licensed by the number
of cores, whereas for the newer Integrity servers licensing is by
socket count.
Because the per-core performance of x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise
Server is often 2x that of Itanium/HP-UX, you have big savings
on application licensing because you need fewer cores (and
sockets) to run applications, resulting in lower software
licensing costs.
Regardless of whether HP-UX 11i v3 is running on old or newer
Integrity servers, HP-UX 11i v3 is expensive compared to SUSE Linux
Enterprise Server (socket count licensed). Pricing for the Virtual
Server OE, which includes Integrity VM and vPar partitions on an
older Integrity server, is US$4,420 per core and 50 percent of that
for the newer Integrity servers (when socket pricing is translated
into core pricing). The cost for a higher performing x86 multi-core
server from AMD or Intel running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is
a fraction of the cost of most Itanium/HP-UX 11i v3 platforms.
erformance
P
x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is a clear winner on per­ orm­
f
ance tests, especially the core SPEC performance benchmarks.
When coupled with the cost of Itanium servers, x86/SUSE Linux
Enterprise Server is a huge winner in terms of cost savings.
x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on SPECint, SPECfp,
S
­ PECint_rate and SPeCfp_rate benchmarks clearly outperforms
Itanium/HP-UX 11i v3 by a factor of 2x on a per core basis.
ig Data support
B
SUSE has been heavily involved in Big Data with partners such
as Teradata, SAP (with SAP HANA), IBM, Cloudera, Hortonworks
and others.
Itanium/HP-UX provides no visible support for Big Data.
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server supports the open Hadoop
f
­ ramework for processing Big Data. SUSE also provides the
SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension to run
multiple clusters for Big Data processing.
Summary and Conclusion
Itanium/HP-UX still has excellent RAS capabilities. It could
also be formidable competitor with Linux for the back-end,
mission-critical database applications market if Itanium had
not lost favor in the market. Today, Itanium/HP-UX is viewed
as having:
An extremely uncertain roadmap, even for the next few
years, due to lack of market interest in both Itanium and
HP-UX, and most important, lack of interest in Itanium by
Intel. In short, HP-UX is a dying platform
A lack of the technology, interoperability and innovation
necessary to modernize data centers to accommodate new
IT trends such as cloud computing, Big Data, mobile devices
and social media
A confusing cloud computing strategy and product offering
Costly operating system licensing and costly hardware
6
Poor per core performance
Limited virtualization, and limited interoperation with other
virtualization software
Rapidly dropping ISV enthusiasm
Lock-in
In contrast, x86/SUSE Enterprise Linux Server offers the in­
ter­ perability, openness to innovation, higher performance
o
and lower cost necessary for success today and tomorrow.
As a result:
x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is an excellent platform
for replacing your more costly, lower performing Itanium/
HP-UX systems.
x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is an excellent platform
for modernizing your data center.

7. Contact your local SUSE Solutions Provider,
or call SUSE at:
1 800 796 3700 U.S./Canada
1 801 861 4500 Worldwide
SUSE
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Germany
www.suse.com
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