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HP-UX gets biannual face-lift
Serviceguard for Linux gets the boot
The Last Rites of SGLX
In a related item, it has recently come to El Reg's attention that HP has quietly killed off its Serviceguard for Linux (SGLX) clustering software for Linux. It is remarkable how much noise a vendor can make when they expand one product from one platform to another, and how utterly still they are when they decide to stop selling it. The only reason El Reg even knew to ask Cox about what the status was for SGLX was because of a HP-UX and Linux shop who fired off an email last week, asking what was up.
Well, apparently the death of SGLX was not greatly exaggerated, and it is indeed dead. And in fact, HP killed it off in the spring, as you can see from this notice on the HP site. April 27 of this year, to be precise.
According to Cox, even though customers prefer Serviceguard clustering overwhelmingly for their key backend HP-UX systems - he says there are tens of thousands of customers using it, and that Serviceguard for HP-UX has a much higher attach rate than the clustering add-ons that IBM sells for AIX or Sun Microsystems sells for Solaris - there were only a few hundred customers using the Linux version to do high availability clustering for Linux on Integrity boxes. Even on these machines, HP has found, customers tend to prefer the integrated clustering that comes with Red Hat and Novell Linux distributions.
"It is hard to compete with free," Cox observes dryly.
Customers have until October 31, the end of HP's fiscal 2009 year, to buy licenses to Serviceguard for Linux A.11.19, the final release that was announced earlier this year for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 and 11. The Serviceguard for Linux A.11.18 and A.11.19 releases will have three years of proactive support and two additional years of limited proactive support with knowledgebase access. ®