Mission-critical computing is defined differently depending on who you ask. There are many different ways to achieve the SLA requirements of mission-critical applications, but in most cases, it translates to specialized hardware and an Enterprise optimized UNIX. For Hewlett-Packard this traditionally means Itanium-based infrastructure and HP-UX. The week of Thanksgiving, HP announced a new plan to bring the same level of mission-critical performance to Xeon-based systems, along with working with kernel.org collaborators to facilitate scaling with Linux and x86 architecture.
