Oxford University Press wins oldest HP-UX prize

The longest-running HP-UX server in the U.K. has been found.

The find is the result of a competition, launched by Hewlett-Packard in April, to locate the oldest HP-UX installation in continuous service.

The server belongs to Oxford University Press, the publishing arm of the elite university, and it's still running happily after more than 10 years of service.

Oxford University Press is the largest university book publisher in the world, and the Oxford English Dictionary is its largest project. The publisher has 11 terabytes of data stored on its main systems alone, including 5TB in production. Its old HP-UX systems sit happily in a data center alongside its multicore alternatives.

As recognition of its support for HP-UX, HP has awarded Oxford University Press a prize of an entry-class Integrity server, a license for HP-UX 11i v3, installation and a three-year "Support plus 24" care pack from HP. The award was received by technical project manager Geoff Butler.

Oxford University Press' HP-UX server is used to track the life cycle of its books. The system was based on a package which was developed over a period of three years or so, Butler said. Once the Oxford University Press was happy, the system ran--and ran. "It just does a job well," Butler said. "But it is an important job--mission-critical."

The server fits into a wide range of systems at the publisher, running various applications, including Oracle and SAP, which Butler also works on.

Colin Barker of ZDNet UK reported from London.

[wylbur]

Are we supposed to be impressed by ten years?

There are PDP-11s and IBM370s that were in service for 30 years,
come on, they could only find one server a decade old! Sounds as if
HP servers are not built so well.

[cozappz]

HP servers

Well, it is not about reliability but who was buying HP-UX when other alternatives were cheaper or more powerful? ;)

[dmine45]

Older than dirt but still works

The DoD has some old HP-UX machines still running after all these years. They work rather well. Granted, the new generations are all Sun Solaris blade servers, but the old HP-UX machines work fine.

[brnaptown]

We have the oldest

We have a server that's been running a data warehouse for over 11 years, beginning in 1996. Still in use.

Home directory:

drwxr-xr-x 35 root root 1024 Mar 7 2006 home

uname:

HP-UX ohpsrv03 B.10.20 B 9000/829 1172831381 16-user license

A mix of gloating and sorrow.

[brnaptown]

correction

drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 8192 Jun 10 1996 lost+found

[twilleat]

I have Jun 10 1996 also

lr-xr-xr-t 1 root sys 8 Jun 10 1996 lib ->
/usr/lib
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 96 Jun 10 1996 lost+found

However, upon first reading the story, I assumed they were talking about longest uptime. But, it never does say that, so...