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Red Hat to Drop Itanium Support in Enterprise Linux 6 (PC World)
Red Hat is dropping support for the Itanium processor in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6 according to a PC World article.
"Dropping support for Itanium makes economic sense for Red Hat, according to Chris Ingle, research director for IDC's European Systems Group. The number of Itanium-based servers sold is likely not high enough for Red Hat to justify spending its resources on supporting a version of Enterprise Linux for this processor."
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Red Hat to Drop Itanium Support in Enterprise Linux 6 (PC World) Posted Dec 21, 2009 22:03 UTC (Mon) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]
There must be a typo in the title. Shouldn't that be Itanic? ;-)
Red Hat to Drop Itanium Support in Enterprise Linux 6 (PC World) Posted Dec 21, 2009 22:31 UTC (Mon) by cyperpunks (subscriber, #39406) [Link]
Is Power so much larger? Or is IBM closer and HP too close MS? Great news any way.
Red Hat to Drop Itanium Support in Enterprise Linux 6 (PC World) Posted Dec 22, 2009 6:08 UTC (Tue) by Ed_L. (guest, #24287) [Link] There's probably a bit more going on here, and am curious how this news qualifies as "great". I suspect IBM puts in sufficient development effort to ensure Enterprise Linux (RH and SuSE) run on Power, and run well. Why HP and Intel no longer do so for Itanium is the question. At least for Red Hat. Remains to be seen how SLES will continue. Perhaps Intel/HP simply saw no point in supporting both.
Red Hat to Drop Itanium Support in Enterprise Linux 6 (PC World) Posted Dec 22, 2009 14:25 UTC (Tue) by roblucid (subscriber, #48964) [Link]
For openSUSE 11.2 PPC was dropped, it was 0.3% of the installs and IIRC some stuff broke and wouldn't compile, which could not be allowed to block i586 and x86_64.
A reason to support Itanic in Enterprise might be to permit same distro to be used on same servers, but how Novell SLES could credibly support Itanic when RH as key gcc contributors don't I wonder.
Red Hat to Drop Itanium Support in Enterprise Linux 6 (PC World) Posted Dec 23, 2009 1:18 UTC (Wed) by Ed_L. (guest, #24287) [Link] I thought Novell was a key gcc contributor as well. In any event, the article was about Red Hat dropping RHEL 6 Itanium support which, although certainly dependent upon gcc, is a different thing entirely.
Red Hat to Drop Itanium Support in Enterprise Linux 6 (PC World) Posted Jan 2, 2010 22:48 UTC (Sat) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]
Factory is still built for PPC.
Red Hat to Drop Itanium Support in Enterprise Linux 6 (PC World) Posted Dec 22, 2009 13:52 UTC (Tue) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]
Ebay already shows an increase in Itanium server auctions...
Red Hat to Drop Itanium Support in Enterprise Linux 6 (PC World) Posted Dec 25, 2009 13:10 UTC (Fri) by hmh (subscriber, #3838) [Link]
If you can get Itanium for cheap, go for it, and install Debian. IA64 is a very good arch, and much, much safer (security-wise) than amd64 and ia32.
Red Hat to Drop Itanium Support in Enterprise Linux 6 (PC World) Posted Dec 31, 2009 22:27 UTC (Thu) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]
IA64 is pretty boring from a developer view. Like x86, it is neither alignment-sensitive nor big-endian and it it these two features that one would wish for in an x86-dominated world. I know it helped me armortize programs, since valgrind does not detect these two kinds of bugs.
Red Hat to Drop Itanium Support in Enterprise Linux 6 (PC World) Posted Dec 22, 2009 15:39 UTC (Tue) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
I think this could make sense. It now seems unlikely that Itanium will even rival Power in terms of sales volume. The next major revision of the chip has been pushed back so far and so often that if it were an x86-64 chip, with actual competitors, it would have been cancelled. Sooner or later that means Intel will decide to stop investing in new versions of Itanium, and that will kill it dead as a platform (for new sales).
If you're already committed to buying Itanium servers next year, you'll get 4 years support on RHEL5. Time to look at x86-64 offerings for the next batch of hardware.
I conclude that Microsoft are already thinking the same thing - support existing customers, but gently encourage them to look at other alternatives for new hardware. Better to have their business than not have it, but better still to get them onto commodity x86-64 where they're cheaper to support. So don't expect the next Windows Server version on Itanium.
Red Hat to Drop Itanium Support in Enterprise Linux 6 (PC World) Posted Dec 23, 2009 16:32 UTC (Wed) by markhb (guest, #1003) [Link] The next major revision of the chip has been pushed back so far and so often that if it were an x86-64 chip, with actual competitors, it would have been cancelled. Sooner or later that means Intel will decide to stop investing in new versions of Itanium, and that will kill it dead as a platform (for new sales). If you're already committed to buying Itanium servers next year, you'll get 4 years support on RHEL5. Time to look at x86-64 offerings for the next batch of hardware.That may be true if the chip's future relied entirely on the midrange server market. However, HP has moved their NonStop line (the Machines Formerly Known As Tandem) to Itanium, and for the prices they get for those babies and the value of the niche they occupy I think HP and Intel will keep the chip going for quite a while, with or without a Unix-like OS. They do still sell Guardian, after all.
Red Hat to Drop Itanium Support in Enterprise Linux 6 (PC World) Posted Dec 23, 2009 22:11 UTC (Wed) by mrjk (subscriber, #48482) [Link]
Right but does anyone run RHEL on these Tandem type machines? In a real role? I doubt there are
many. People who buy those are buying the culture and support around them including the sellers OS and guarantees on that OS. Plus in 4 years who will be buying new ones for new deployments? Nobody. Anybody buying one will already have a similar environment to slip them into. I am sure Red Hat would love to support this architecture - that would mean paying users.
Power is much larger environment - you are talking IBM mainframes and mainframe VM's, plus
Red Hat to Drop Itanium Support in Enterprise Linux 6 (PC World) Posted Dec 22, 2009 19:18 UTC (Tue) by donbarry (guest, #10485) [Link]
Simple solution: Debian, Debian, Debian.
Runs on i386, amd64, powerpc, sparc, HP PA-RISC,
Freedom from the random decisions of profit-games
Red Hat to Drop Itanium Support in Enterprise Linux 6 (PC World) Posted Dec 22, 2009 21:19 UTC (Tue) by mmcgrath (guest, #44906) [Link]
> Simple solution: Debian, Debian, Debian.
3 Debians are the same as one Red Hat? That sounds about right.
Obscene wealth Posted Dec 22, 2009 21:45 UTC (Tue) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]
Obscene wealth these days is restricted to military support contractors,
world-wide economic collapse-causing investment bankers, and monopolistic extortionists. Dot-com millionaires only end up with comfortable fortunes.
Red Hat to Drop Itanium Support in Enterprise Linux 6 (PC World) Posted Dec 23, 2009 2:39 UTC (Wed) by Kit (guest, #55925) [Link]
> Simple solution: Debian, Debian, Debian.
Does Debian provide "enterprise class support"? If not, then it's not a solution for many (whether "enterprise class support" is good or not is immaterial, since for many organizations they believe they want it and just saying it's not better than/inferior to Debian's support won't suddenly make them change their mind).
---
> personal vanity distribution
Red Hat to Drop Itanium Support in Enterprise Linux 6 (PC World) Posted Dec 23, 2009 22:48 UTC (Wed) by vlx (guest, #51883) [Link]
It makes sense.
HP-UX on Itanium is big competition for RedHat, one that they can't surpass. HP-UX has big advantage that it's made in HP which is invovled directly in Itanium server development so can use full potential of all Itanium severs. HP-UX has been optimized for Itaniums for long time and is bit native there. Hardware is developed together with/for HP-UX in mind. So they are able to use all the functions it provides (eg. Numa arch, nPars, vPars ..) from begining.
Yes HP-UX is commercial and price is higher but you get it for free in comparison to price of high end Itanium based servers..
Red Hat to Drop Itanium Support in Enterprise Linux 6 (PC World) Posted Dec 24, 2009 0:56 UTC (Thu) by Ed_L. (guest, #24287) [Link] Now that begins to make sense. Assume 100% of Itanium installs require enterprise OS support. If you are an IA64 shop, who are you going to buy it from? Jokes aside, HP-UX is no slouch operating system. What advantage does RHEL offer in the Itanium environment?Yes, I know for most of us RHEL or CentOS or Debian or Ubuntu or Gentoo or Slack or Fedora or even OpenSuSE :) offer all sorts of compelling goodies. But that isn't the question. Does anyone know if Itanium has anywhere near the VM capability of Z-System/Power, or is it usually deployed in a traditional high performance one-OS, few critical-app server environment?
Red Hat to Drop Itanium Support in Enterprise Linux 6 (PC World) Posted Dec 25, 2009 17:05 UTC (Fri) by vlx (guest, #51883) [Link]
This is more a HW diviging of mig/high range severs to smaller ones:
http://h20338.www2.hp.com/enterprise/w1/en/os/hpux11i-par...
Former concept vPars. It's bit HW/SW sepration layer not full HW based virtualization:
This is newest concept form HP on Itanium -Integrity Virtual Machines - Full HW virtualziation:
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