HP, whose third-rank Unix franchise could have been really pushed to the back of the bus if Sun took IBM up on its offer a couple of weeks ago and they combined forces, has enhanced its Serviceguard software and its HP-UX 11i operating environment to lower planned downtime and associated administrative time and costs.

Its Serviceguard software, part of HP's Virtual Server Environment, protects mission-critical applications against hardware and software failures and is tightly integrated with the company's virtualization and storage management widgetry.

Serviceguard 11.19 is supposed to deliver 83% faster failover than its predecessor. Users can stay up and running during maintenance. HP claims the performance improvement won't degrade if the cluster expands.

It can, HP says, eliminate 100% of planned downtime; resources can be added or subtracted and an application's parameters changed while running.

HP's also got an extension for SAP that it says is the first high-availability solution for SAP liveCache for Supply Chain Management. It keeps the supply chain running and cuts liveCache recovery - which used to take hours if not days - to as little as two minutes.

The widgetry can also cut admin time and costs by 25% by integrating SAP applications into a single clustered environment.

The HP-UX 11iv3 Update 4, the company's regular six-month rev, reduces time-to-deployment from days to hours by downloading the system software off of high-bandwidth replicated servers; eliminates 50% of the planned downtime associated with an upgrade by simplifying management; reduces energy costs up to 8% per processor by dynamically controlling the power drawn by active processors to align with workloads; and overwrites and erases disks in place so drives with sensitive data can be reused. That new Disk Scrub facility used to be done by third parties but is now free.

IBM owns 37.2% of the Unix market, according to IDC, Sun has 28.1% and HP 26.5%.