Since about 2000, the focus of HP-UX has increasingly been on enhanced reliability, security, and partitioning. The reliability is provided through clustering technology and package failover on a system outage, as well as redundant hardware, increased quality testing, and error monitoring and correction. Security features have significantly increased with 11i v2, with the addition of kernel-based intrusion detection, strong random number generation, stack buffer overflow protection, security partitioning, role-based access management, and various open source security tools. The system partitioning ranges from hardware partitions to isolated OS virtual partitions, and most recently the Virtual Server Environment (VSE).

Following the merger of HP with Compaq in 2001, plans were made to merge the Tru64 TruCluster technology with HP-UX. This had been expected to occur with the release of the long-delayed 11i v3 version. However, HP had suffered employment reductions in key departments during the economic downturn, and so at the end of 2004 the decision was made to cancel this project. Instead HP partnered with Veritas on a clustering solution.

Prior to the release of HP-UX version 11.11, HP used a decimal version numbering scheme with the first number giving the major release and the number following the decimal showing the minor release. With 11.11, HP made a marketing decision to name their releases 11i followed by a v(decimal-number) for the version. The i was intended to indicate the OS is Internet-enabled, but the effective result was a dual version-numbering scheme. (The name change was apparently made to pay homage to the World War I Armistice anniversary, which occurs on 11.11 in nations that use decimal dates.)