


There's no love lost between these two former friends



I. HP and Oracle -- Friends Become Enemies







II. Oracle Fires Back


She writes:



III. Itanium: Bye, Bye, Bye







The company accuses:



Comments     Threshold


Itanium is dead?
By Argon18 on 6/16/2011 12:12:14 PM , Rating: 2
This article is funny to me. It mentions Solaris running on SPARC, and AIX running on POWER. Both of those are single-vendor systems. What I mean by that, is that both the OS and the hardware (CPU) come from a single vendor. Solaris runs on SPARC. Nothing else runs on SPARC. AIX runs on POWER. Nothing else runs on POWER. Now lets look at Itanium. HP-UX and OpenVMS run on Itanium. How does that make Itanium "dead" - HP-UX and OpenVMS run exclusively now on Itanium, which if anything, means that Itanium has a market monopoly with no competitors! If you want AIX, you buy a POWER server from IBM. If you want Solaris, you buy a SPARC server from Sun. And if you want HP-UX or OpenVMS, you buy an Itanium server from HP.

Itanium was originally intended to be an open market chip, as evidenced by RedHat and Microsoft's adoption of it. They've since dropped it, and now it's just HP. So Itanium in essence has dropped down to the same level as SPARC and POWER in that it's a single-vendor architecture.

Nobody buys Itanium because they want Itanium. They buy an HP-UX server which just happens to run Itanium. Nobody buys SPARC or POWER because they want that specific chipset - they buy a SPARC or POWER server because they want Solaris, or AIX.

RE: Itanium is dead?
By JasonMick (blog) on 6/16/2011 12:29:11 PM , Rating: 2

Err... HP-UX and OpenVMS are both developed (or the case of OpenVMS co-developed) by HP, so Itanium is a single-vendor system now, in effect (though DEC co-develops OpenVMS)

SPARC, POWER, and Itanium all occupy the same niche of mission-critical services. So they are comparable.

As to the item of Itanium approaching end of life (preparing to die), that's what Oracle says Intel told it. If Oracle is lying that will be exposed and it will likely have a substantial civil ($$) liability. I doubt Oracle would be that stupid, so for now I'm taking its statement at face value.

Intel and HP's statements on the topic were kinda like the Anthony Weiner interviews -- they won't confirm or deny end of life. They merely remark that they're "committed" to the current roadmap, which will last several years and see a few more releases. Past that, they've stated nothing to deny that the lineup will be phased out.

It's likely HP and Intel are declining to confirm or deny EOL because if they do customers may opt to stop order future models and switch sooner to competitive designs.

Intel likely hold off on that announcement so that it can try to transition Itanium tech into the Xeon lineup and convince its current customers to switch to new Xeon offerings.

RE: Itanium is dead?
By Argon18 on 6/16/2011 2:21:05 PM , Rating: 2
You're missing the point. When you buy HP-UX or OpenVMS, you are buying Itanium. There is no other currently sold processor that will run HP-UX or OpenVMS. So long as there are HP-UX and OpenVMS customers, there will be Itanium customers.

RE: Itanium is dead?
By Black1969ta on 6/16/2011 3:48:12 PM , Rating: 2
I think you have missed the point.

The software layer is of smaller importance than the hardware layer, when a company considers an order of this class of hardware they don't go to a Best Buy and pick the one with the prettiest interface, they choose the hardware that fits the needs of the company best. The software just tags along with the chosen hardware, but if software support is lacking then even the best hardware fails to meet anyone's needs.

RE: Itanium is dead?
By DanNeely on 6/16/2011 4:14:06 PM , Rating: 2
For mission critical systems, even if a different platform is better on paper, the risk of changing platforms is high enough that most buyers go with a faster version of what they already have. The risk of something going wrong during the migration is much higher than the difference in competing platforms.

