Some months ago, in April, the server and general consumer hardware manufacturing company Hewlett-Packard, better known as HP, announced the launch of a competition that was aimed at locating the oldest and still running HP-UX server system. Well, now such a server system was found in the United Kingdom and it belongs to the Oxford University.

The old HP-UX server system is part of the computing grid that belongs to the Oxford University Press and it has been running for ten years now for the most important university book producer in the world. Among the most notable projects that involved the use of the HP made server, was the Oxford English Dictionary and the publishing house stores into its main system alone more than 11TB of data, while a further 5TB are in production.

In the Oxford data center, the HP-UX is sitting right next to the latest generation of systems, including multi core based servers. As a recognition of the high quality server that was the HP-UX, the manufacturing company 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, which were all received by the Oxford's representative, technical project manager Geoff Butler.

Geoff Butler was cited by the news site news.com saying that right now the HP-UX is used to track the life cycle of the books released by the Oxford University Press. "It just does a job well," Butler said. "But it is an important job – mission-critical."

This old server system is working together with a wide range of other computers and servers at the publishing house and it is able to run various enterprise class software applications including large database managers like Oracle and SAP.