HP Unix's 25 years and The Millennium Bug
By Tabrez Khan
Mumbai, Nov 19, 2008 1750 hrs IST

Hewlett Packard is commemorating the 25th anniversary of HP's Unix and on the occasion Brian Cox, director-Marketing, HP and Santanu Ghose, country head-HP India spoke to CXOtoday on a number of issues including Unix's journey so far, future strategy, a new grid-computing offering and the much talked about Unix Millennium bug.

The Unix operating system has a unique place in computing history because it has been fundamental to the growth of client-server model and the Internet. "Companies such as SAP and Oracle would not have been there if you didn't have Unix. The open nature of the Unix o/s has spawned a number of important enterprise applications over the years," said Brian Cox.

"The reliability of Unix operating system has grown over the years, especially with the clustering technology that has helped reinforce reliability as a key feature of Unix. A majority of large installations in India depend on the Unix platform for their most critical business applications," said Shantanu Ghose, country manager, HP India.

Reflecting on competition from Windows and Linux operating systems, Cox said that Windows was more focused on consumer applications and each new release of that company first came on the PC and then several months later on the server. "Getting into challenging business problems is not a Windows or Linux forte, they are good at adding features, but when it comes to business critical applications and reliability, Unix is what enterprises rely on."

Hewlett Packard is coming out with an offering similar to grid-computing for enterprises that will enable CIOs to allocate computing resources to applications as per their requirement.

One of the key pain areas of CIOs has been inefficient utilization and allocation of computing resources. Servers are often dedicated and configured to specific applications or departments, which means that they cannot be shared for other applications or departments.

"So often we have a scenario where less than 20% of a server is being utilized, whereas some other resource has reached peak load and needs more power, but the spare computing power available is siloed and cannot be reallocated," said Cox.

The new offering is aimed at resolving this issue and letting CIOs have the flexibility to allocate computing power to applications as and when they need it.

Replying to a question on Unix's own version of the y2k or the millennium bug, Cox said that HP was quite conscious of the fact and the development teams were working to resolve that glitch.

Cox referred to the Y2K bug around the turn of the century saying even though there was a lot of hype created then too, software vendors were able to work out a solution and it had no impact.

The year 2038 problem (also known as "Unix Millennium bug", or "Y2K38" by analogy to the Y2K problem) may cause some computer software to fail before or in the year 2038. The problem affects all software and systems that store system time as a signed 32-bit integer, and interpret this number as the number of seconds since January 1, 1970.