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Hewlett-Packard skipped a year in its timeline to increase the virtualization capabilities of its HP-UX 11i Unix operating system, thanks to an OEM deal with Veritas the two companies announced on Thursday.

Officials from both companies unveiled a multiyear agreement under which HP will OEM Veritas' Storage Foundation Cluster File System and Storage Foundation for Oracle RAC, then integrate that software into HP Serviceguard. Serviceguard is high-availability clustering software aimed at increasing IT infrastructure reliability.

By bringing Veritas' Cluster File System to HP-UX, HP enables its customers and solution providers to adjust server usage with virtual services according to businesses' changing needs, said Nick Vanderzweep, HP's director of virtualization and utility computing.

The key difference will be in the eased management of clusters, said Vanderzweep.

Currently changes to one node in a cluster must be replicated manually to the other nodes, Vanderzweep said. But by adding Veritas' Cluster File System, any changes can be automatically propagated or synchronized across multiple nodes on a cluster, as well as across multiple clusters, he said.

And because Veritas works with multiple platforms, the technology will enable HP's customers to perform more heterogeneous clustering in the future, Vanderzweep said.

While most of these capabilities were already in the roadmap presented to HP-UX customers, they were to have come by way of porting TruCluster technology and Advanced File System from the old Compaq Tru64 operating system, said Vanderzweep. That port would not have been finished before mid-2006, however. Now customers will get the capabilities a year earlier, he said. But customers also get that ability to automate changes across clusters -- capability that was not included in the Tru64 technology, he said.

And because the new clustering technology is now expected a year ahead of schedule, it will now appear in the current Version 2 of HP-UX 11i, instead of in Version 3 as originally planned, Vanderzweep said.

Solution providers now selling HP-UX can already sell Veritas' File System from HP's price list, said Vanderzweep. Therefore, the move to incorporate Veritas' Cluster File System can be done with little impact to solution providers, he said.