Red Hat will drop the Itanic

LINUX SOFTWARE HOUSE Red Hat has decided that there is not enough interest in Intel's Itanium processor to keep supporting it.

The next version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 will be Itanium free and while Red Hat is not the only Linux it will be a bit of a morale blow for Intel.

The Itanium is Intel's 64-bit enterprise chip, which we've long called the Itanic, and it is not exactly a best seller for Red Hat.

According to Linux World, beancounters at IDC say that Itanium sales are worth $6.6 billion per year. However at the same time Chris Ingle, research director for IDC's European Systems Group, said it makes sense for Red Hat to stop supporting it.

Most Itanium servers run Unix. In Europe, 61 per cent of Itanium-based servers shipped in 2009 used Unix, compared to 29 per cent that ran Linux and 5 per cent on Windows, according to IDC.

The number of Itanium-based Linux servers sold is likely not high enough for Red Hat to justify spending its resources on supporting a version of Enterprise Linux for the processor. Instead it will focus on support for x86-based servers, Ingle said.

In addition to the commodity Intel x86 market, Red Hat also supports its Linux distribution on IBM Power, System z and S/390 processor architectures.

Few people will actually notice Red Hat's plan to drop support for Itanium because most of the Intel Red Hat users look to their OEMs for support.

If the few Linux users running Itanium servers stick to Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 5, the company said it will support them until March 2014, and it will add new features to version 5 on Itanium and support new hardware in accordance with its standard product lifecycle policy. µ