December 21, 2009 at 04:55 a.m.Red Hat discontinues Itanium support
As the readers of the Register write, and Red Hat is forced to confirm that Itanium's corporate support will continue only until 2014, and in principle it will not exist in RHEL 6.
The cessation of RHEL's development and commercial support for Itanium naturally means that Red Hat simply does not see a profit in this area. Two conclusions may be suggested: either Linux on such architectures is, in principle, not selling well, or Itanium specifically has a problem. The first hypothesis is refuted by the fact that support for Red Hat POWER servers will continue. So it looks like IBM and HP partners are seeing sales of the latter fall more. It is clear that the server market has collapsed from the crisis on the whole front, but someone has already begun to recover gradually, and Itanium may not survive this storm.
Bad sign for HP. Of course, the difficult fate of the platform is known, but over the years of its existence, many customers around the world have appeared, and which customers. In Russia alone, for example, Alfa-Bank, Wimm-Bill-Dann, Megafon (and many other telecoms). That is, the niche, of course, is narrow, but rich. And not all customers are happy about the prospect of hard running into a proprietary UNIX clone from HP, and Windows Server will only be crazy to use on such a platform. So, we either double the costs (the price of software in this segment may exceed the cost of iron), or we remove the old aitaniums - and what in return? Nobody has canceled performance problems, the cluster is not always and not always convenient to manage, AMD has problems, it is not clear with Sun what will happen, so only POWER of the competitors remains in the near future.
Hmm ... or still mainframes?
The cessation of RHEL's development and commercial support for Itanium naturally means that Red Hat simply does not see a profit in this area. Two conclusions may be suggested: either Linux on such architectures is, in principle, not selling well, or Itanium specifically has a problem. The first hypothesis is refuted by the fact that support for Red Hat POWER servers will continue. So it looks like IBM and HP partners are seeing sales of the latter fall more. It is clear that the server market has collapsed from the crisis on the whole front, but someone has already begun to recover gradually, and Itanium may not survive this storm.
Bad sign for HP. Of course, the difficult fate of the platform is known, but over the years of its existence, many customers around the world have appeared, and which customers. In Russia alone, for example, Alfa-Bank, Wimm-Bill-Dann, Megafon (and many other telecoms). That is, the niche, of course, is narrow, but rich. And not all customers are happy about the prospect of hard running into a proprietary UNIX clone from HP, and Windows Server will only be crazy to use on such a platform. So, we either double the costs (the price of software in this segment may exceed the cost of iron), or we remove the old aitaniums - and what in return? Nobody has canceled performance problems, the cluster is not always and not always convenient to manage, AMD has problems, it is not clear with Sun what will happen, so only POWER of the competitors remains in the near future.
Hmm ... or still mainframes?