HP-UX is Hewlett-Packards version of Unix. It supports the CDE (common desktop environment) which is pretty much analogous to the 'windows' desktop, and is standard across AIX, Sun, and HP-UX.<br><br>For most intents and purposes, HP-UX is pretty much indistinguishable from Sun and AIX. Perhaps the biggest differentiators (at least from an admin's point of view) is the fact that HP's administrator tool (SAM) is less robust than AIX's SMIT. I have been told that the same is true of SAM in comparison with SUN's product, but have no personal experience to back it up. Unlike AIX, HP-UX is relatively weak in tracking system events. In support of this, I would refer you to the AIX facility 'errpt', which tracks hardware/software problems across the operating system, and in many cases will diagnose the problem to the point where the CE has to do nothing more than show up with the board recommended by 'errpt'. HP-UX has a tool called STM (or XSTM) which models the hardware of the system, and runs simple diagnostics against it...but in general, this seems much weaker than IBMs offering. Again, I have no direct experience with SUN. <br><br>Finally, like AIX, HP-UX has a LVM (logical volume manager) integrated into the system, although it is weaker than what is available under AIX. For example, disk-mirroring is an 'extra' that you have to pay for, until recently, file-system journalling was an 'extra', and the ability to dynamically change the size of logical volumes is an 'extra'. Last I checked, these were all standard on AIX. In contrast, SUN does not appear to have LVM support built in, although most SUN people tell me that this is not a problem, because 'all' you have to do is purchase and integrate the veritas product.
