Software collaboration leads to "self-healing"

Palo Alto, 22 October 97 According to Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi and NEC the first milestone in their joint alliance is reached. Cooperation between the companies was designed to help drive the development of HP-UX well into the 21st century. The coming year, joint software collaboration will focus on introducing "self-healing" elements into the operating environment through a new "exception infrastructure". The first components of the exception infrastructure produced by this joint development are expected to be available in HP-UX by the end of 1998.

3DA, HP's architectural blue print for defining the future direction of HP-UX, focuses on delivering advanced features in the areas of modularity, scalability and performance and on delivering features such as the exception infrastructure that enhance the robustness of the operating environment.

The new self-healing enhancements exploit features of PA-RISC(2) and future IA-64 systems-based hardware to enable the identification, isolation and recovery of unexpected software problems detected in the HP-UX kernel. With the infrastructure, the kernel is expected to be more robust and certain processes can be isolated without affecting the total workload.

Initially, the companies will work on the exception-infrastructure and recovery aspects within 3DA. This work will address extending kernel functionality that provides mainframe-type fault recovery. It is designed to take self-healing actions to maintain system integrity when an exception occurs. While maintaining system availability, HP-UX will intercept system-level faults and attempt to recover from the failure or blockade the failing resource.

Sandra Wermer