Oracle has been uncharacteristically quiet about a sudden rant from HP pledging its loyalty to Itanium in the same way that a Texan, who has never seen combat, gets all misty eyed about flying a flag of the stars and stripes, which was made in China, on his front lawn.
ITPro cornered Martin Fink, Senior Vice President and General Manager of HP's Business Critical Systems unit, at the HP Discover event in Vienna and asked him whether Odyssey was a sign that HP was de-emphasising Itanium for its customers.
He seemed to get a bit upset and said they were only asking that question because he supported X86 and therefore can't support Itanium.
Fink muttered that Oracle supports the X86 platform, but they still push SPARC and they haven't deemphasised. IBM pushes X86, but still push POWER and they haven't deemphasised.
"Why would you make that inference that because I announce support for X86 that I'm less committed to Itanium? I'm very committed to Itanium! It's a very common thing in the industry to support X86 and a proprietary hardware," he cried to ITPro.
Yes, but... HP and Oracle are in very public war about the future of Itanium and Oracle insists that both the maker of expensive printer ink and Intel have hatched a cunning plan to pull the carpet out from under the feet of Itanium users.
We understand that given the legal situation Fink is a little touchy about not being seen as an Itanium lover who carries a picture of the chip in his wallet.
He added that the competition had two separate families of computers. In the case of IBM, X86 and Power. HP has one infrastructure which everything goes into. This is "so much better for customers because they can deploy one infrastructure and can fill half of it with Itanium and half with X86. They can't do that with IBM or with Oracle."
We asked Oracle for a comment on Fink's outburst but it was surprisingly shy. We think it must be the cold weather - maybe ice cools the bile.
I don't think the "one infrastructure" argument is more powerful than the uncertainty around Itanium at the moment. Especially for strategic ERP/Database platforms where stability is important.
I don't think the "one infrastructure" argument is more powerful than the uncertainty around Itanium at the moment. Especially for strategic ERP/Database platforms where stability is important.
This is totally false. IBM has had Power servers and x86 servers running in the same chassis for many years.
First, Itanium and x86 cannot run the same workload(s) at same time. Itanium runs HP-UX and HP-UX doesn’t run on x86 so although you can run x86 "side by side" with Itanium, you can't combine them to run a single workload. This is no better/no worse than installing SPARC blades along x86 blades in the same Sun Bade 6000 chassis and I believe IBM can do the same with x86 and Power in their blades. Oracles advantage is you can run the same Solaris OS on both x86 and SPARC. Cant do that with either Itanium, x86 or Power.
Furthermore, who would want to continue running Itanium, when its so far behind in performance compared to XEON, SPARC or Power? From all the benchmarks available, Itanium is 2x -5x slower than latest SPARC T4 or even Power7 and Xeon Westmere-EX. With Itanium being so slow, the cost of running software that’s on per core license basis is just too excessive and so the cost savings moving to SPARC T4 for example would easily pay for the migration costs and reduce TCO. Fink would prefer everyone migrate to x86.. So this is HP's Trojan horse.
So in the end, Fink, realizes that Itanium is dead and will just be a matter of time that customers will migrate to x86, SPARC or Power. The problem with this, is what happens to HP-UX? It also dies as far as I can tell unless HP ports it to x86.. So now theres two migrations to manage. And x86 still can't handle all the workloads that a Unix/RISC/Epic architecture can and why HP has had to sell both x86 and Itanium till now. HP is in a world of hurt these days and it’s a good thing they have a strong printer & paper/ink business to keep them alive while they "re-invent" themselves. Pun intended.