[Info-vax] HP wins Oracle Itanium case

[Keith Parris]

On 8/2/2012 9:19 PM, JF Mezei wrote:
> I realise you are the messenger from HP. So I do not intend to shoot
> the messenger here.

And I hope you don't intend to do any shooting elsewhere, either.

> The wording put out never mentioned that IA64 is to be developped until
> 2022. It mentions that Intel is to make available chips until 2022. In
> other words, Intel will keep surplus IA64 chips until 2022.  This means
> available spares for support beyond end of sale. It doesn't mean
> continued development until 2022.

I'm not privy to the actual wording of the agreement. I picked up the 
word "develop" from the title of the Inquirer article, which said "HP 
can force Intel to develop Itanium until at least 2022", which I took at 
face value in the absence of any evidence to the contrary.

> (Note that HP did something similar with Alphas, with some "special"
> customers able to buy Alphas after the end of sales deadline).

Actually, HP Financial Services will happily sell you a refurbished 
Alphaserver even today, 5 years after the last-sale date for Alpha 
systems. I'm working with a customer who earlier this year purchased two 
32-CPU GS-1280 systems through HPFS. So you, too, can be a "special" 
customer -- if you can write that sort of check. :-)

> However, it is not clear how much software support and upgrades will be
> done to the IA64 operating systems. Once the last VMS patch is out to
> support the alst Kittson+ based model, will VMS patches continue to be
> produced ?  Will TCPIP Services continue to have new releases to support
> whatever protocol tweaks are made on the internet ?

I think we can safely use Alpha as a precedent. Patches for Alpha still 
continue today, 5 years after last-sale date, and plans are to continue 
that for some time to come (as detailed at 
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/openvms_supportchart.html).

> the roadmap has been shrunken to just a couple
> of . releases to support Poulson and Kittson.

I can't remember a time when the VMS Roadmap had more than 1 or 2 
releases in it at a time, plus a placeholder for "future" releases. So 
that hasn't changed.

> People understand that IA64 failed to garner market traction to become
> mainstream and failed to live up to performance expectations.

Poulson at 2.53 Ghz may help in that area.

> People see that HP has put it on life support to extend its lifetime.

Poulson and Kittson are more than life support. Read David Kanter at 
www.realworldtech.com/poulson/ and Intel's Poulson manual at
http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/manuals/itanium-9500-reference-manual.zip 
and you'll see that Intel put a lot of engineering effort into Poulson. 
It is likely that Kittson and Kittson+ will have just as impressive a 
level of engineering work as Poulson.

> By basically
> lying to customers about the real plans for IA64, HP is destroying its
> enterprise vendor image

Intel came to HP in 2007 saying it couldn't continue with the status 
quo, and HP and Intel came to a satisfactory arrangement that made both 
of them happy, kept Itanium profitable, and allowed it to move forward 
through at least 2022. I don't see that as HP lying -- more like HP 
detecting a potentially-serious problem behind the scenes and fixing it 
before it could adversely affect the customers.