2010/1/17 Stephen John Smoogen <[email protected]>

> 2010/1/15 Zoran Popović <[email protected]>:
> > I feel deceived :( ... Itanium is not going to be supported after March
> 2014
> > and in RHEL 6 ?!!?!?!! I know this probably is a bit late reaction, I
> have
> > also a SR open with this question and a business case officially
> documented
> > in my company (I can send it gladly to anyone interested) with proposal
> > based on RHEL and HP Integrity blades (Itanium). I will open another SR
> if
> > needed, but I am not sure this is the best way. Now, can anyone give me
> > deeper insights on this, hints how to turn somebody's attention (manager
> in
> > RHEL which could help or at least deliver options), suggestions, anything
> ?
> > I know that Itanium has a strange story, but you don't just give up like
> > that  on a platform which is still supported by other vendors, this is
> not
> > good. I have Micro$oft people here awaiting this situation with all the
> joy
> > knowing that hardware migration is not an option, and HP being
> indifferent.
>
> I think if HP is being indifferent about money its a sign that the
> overall product is not going well. Most every Itanium project I knew
> of has been moth-balled or converted to x86_64. One project which was
> to replace an SGI MIPS cluster went to Itanium to x86_64 with the MIPS
> still working and the Itanium being sold as spare parts.
>

Looking at the data, I would figure that the size of the Itanium
> market is too small for continued investment. It is probably only
> possible under very expensive contracts (as in 10-20x more than what a
> contract is currently costing if what the costs in keeping old VAX
> systems is anything to go by).. and most people would look at it and
> say we could afford 10x as many Intel x86_64 boxes for that.
>
>
HP / Compaq / DEC sold Alphas (VAX before that) to banks, stock market and
some military/government institutions - and from what I know, this is by
quantity a small piece of the pie, but by quality very important to them.
There intention still and will be (never gave any other signals) to migrate
Alphas and PA-RISC to Integrity == Itanium. My opinion is that they are very
self-confident about their customers, and so they rely solely on their
solutions, including OS/OE == HP-UX ... they have their competence centres
with Intel and maybe with few big names, I can only guess that RHEL is not
under their grace that much :(( ...


>
> What vendors are still supporting Itanium?
>

SAP for one, Oracle (but I do get strange signals like late patch dates
compared to other architectures), Micro$oft (they have all major versions of
Win2kX supported fully), and my company has proactive support agreements
with all of them (incuding HP and somewhat RHEL). So, nobody mentioned
desupport except RHEL, so far !!!


> How much time would it take to move off of that platform to another
> architecture?
>

Measured in what terms, money, effort (people-days),  risk assessment, time
and financial constraints, ... ? Ohh just give me those pills, please ...
If one smaller Itanium blade costs cca 3000 euros and a tougher Proliant
costs not much less, management will always take the bottom line - I
understand that risks with architecture migration are greater than few
server penalties, but they don't know what it means to restart bloody M$
servers every few weeks because of memory leaks and other stupid stuff. They
wouldn't touch a thing if works just for itself, meaning, decision will be
prolonged until it becomes meaningless or all dates exceeded, and then
someone will come and start all over again from scratch or buy off
everything ... we had RHEL representatives and consultants strolling around
year or two ago in few iterations, but their suggestions were very passive
or useless: they knew they are coming into a completely Micro$oft oriented
company with infrastructure services (LDAP=Active Directory,
Mail&Collaboration=Exchange, Security/CA=ISA&Windows, desktops=Windows XP,
etc) and gave suggestions like - turn desktops to Red Hat workstations with
virtualization for client applications which are not available otherwise
(with all the spoilt users and troubles with other projects), SAP should be
tested year or two on a separate platform and then implemented in production
(hey, we did complete SAP implementation in 9-12 months, with almost all
major ERP modules except HR from perspective of our management), and
infrastructure server services left to be migrated later on ... but
everything came clear to me when I've found out that RHEL consultant did
most of negotiation details with the main M$ apologist system engineer in my
company for some reasons !!!! Now, I really don't know whose oversight that
was, but mine failure was only that I didn't start more aggressively and
earlier things about SAP and RHEL. I must admit that SAP consultants were
always more business aware and insightful, while I listen from M$ colleagues
how they spend Micro$oft's presentation budget on in-house projects and
consultations, and I can obviously only dream of that with HP and RHEL. At
least that is the current situation here.


>
> > Please help,
> > Zoran Popovic.
>
>
>
> --
> Stephen J Smoogen.
>
> Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp. Or what's a heaven for?
> -- Robert Browning
>
> _______________________________________________
> rhelv5-list mailing list
> [email protected]
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/rhelv5-list
>
_______________________________________________
rhelv5-list mailing list
[email protected]
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/rhelv5-list

Reply via email to