HP says it's going to stop hiding its light under a bushel and advertise the fact that it upgrades its 20-year-old Unix operating system roughly every six months - and has done so for the last three years.

It's so taken with the idea that it's even going to start giving the things human names like Vitality, Vibrancy and Versatility.

Vitality, the first of the next three HP-UX 11i upgrades, came out last month and will support 100 million zettabytes worth of mass storage, enough room to oblige even the most obsessed pack rat another 10 years or so.

It also does what HP says other operating systems can't do and dynamically add - or subtract - processors, memory and I/O to partitions without shutting down, a facility called Dynamic nPars.