“At its annual HP World user conference in Chicago this week, Hewlett-Packard Co. will announce a number of enhancements to its HP-UX operating system, designed to narrow the gap between the capabilities of the company’s Integrity and HP 9000 servers.

“The Palo Alto, Calif., company is also developing enhancements to the Virtual Server Environment software it ships with its HP-UX Unix operating system that will bring a number of the virtualization features that are, at present, only available on HP-UX to the Linux and Windows servers in HP’s Itanium 2-based Integrity product line.

“With the Unix upgrade, expected in October, HP will for the first time ship the same version of HP-UX on both Integrity and its PA-RISC-based HP 9000 hardware lines, said Mary Ellen Lewandowski, Unix marketing manager with HP. ‘Our original plan had been to have (HP-UX 11i) v3 be the common release, but there was such an interest in having this capability sooner that we brought it in and are delivering it.’”