Itanium to gain Red Hat VM support and more

THE IMMINENT next version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is to come with Xen virtualisation optimised for Itanium 2, Intel said today as part of a robust defence of its server chip.

The hypervisor tweak will give Intel's top-end part a shot at becoming the host of choice in server consolidation projects, said Michael Demshki, Intel enterprise marketing manager and part of the Itanium Solutions Alliance, a grouping of supporters that is just celebrating its second birthday.

“Some people might be hesitant to have a web server alongside an ERP or HR system on a virtualised server because they don't want the corporate crown jewels on the same system in case of a failure or malware traversing from one VM to another,” Demshki said. “But with Itanium's RAS capabilities and electronically-isolated partitioning, the Red Hat Xen support is going to be a very big deal.”

Itanium tends to get a little less airplay than Xeon, Centrino or the B-side of an old single by Sigue Sigue Sputnik these days, but in some corners of IDF the flag still flutters and Demshki insisted the chip has a prosperous future. Itanium now has over 12,000 applications "fairly evenly" spread over Unix, Windows and Linux, Demshki said, and that level of porting will generate growth, he argued.

“Once you get over 10,000 or so, people tell us that's pretty much critical mass and success breeds success,” he said. “The big companies are using Itanium to run their ERP and other mission-critical deployments and some HPC.”

Despite all the brickbats, ‘Itanic' jokes and reminders of the spectacularly wrong analyst predictions, Itanium is still growing pretty quickly with 40 per cent higher volumes in Q2 than the year-ago total. And while some pundits have suggested that Itanium's distinctive RAS capabilities could be back-ported to Xeon, Demshki downplayed that theory.

“You'll see some innovations waterfall down to Xeon but Itanium has always led in RAS functionality and we don't want to add so much to Xeon that the price goes up,” he said.

Instead, Intel plans to add yet more features geared towards reliability and availability on Itanium. Montvale, the successor to Montecito that is due in Q4 this year, will offer a feature called “core-level lockstep” so results match up when the same calculation is run across two cores, for example.

Demshki conceded that Montvale is a “minor” release but the biggie is scheduled to arrive at the end of 2008 with Tukwila, the multicore Itanium that packs Hyper-Threading, yet more on-die cache RAM, high-speed interconnect and integrated memory controller.

After that will come Poulson but there's not even a ballpark date for that chip to arrive. Beyond Poulson, another generation is "already on the drawing boards", Demshki added.