The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected - Swedish proverb
|
|
|
HP rounds up customers to have a go at Oracle
FLOGGER OF EXPENSIVE PRINTER INK HP has rounded up some of its customers to lament Oracle's decision to dump Itanium support in its software.
HP was extremely vocal in its support for Itanium following Oracle's decision to stop developing software for Intel's flagship enterprise architecture. In what was probably the most entertaining press release to hit our desks so far this year, HP not only slammed Oracle's decision as anti-competitive but told The INQUIRER that Oracle servers are "inferior hardware".
Now HP has rounded up a few customers to back up its displeasure with Oracle, but before we hear from them, it's probably best to see what Martin Fink, SVP and general manager of Business Critical Systems at HP has to say.
Fink wasn't quite as candid as his predecessors, saying, "We believe in fair and spirited competition and the customer's right to choose the best technology for their organizations. In their most recent quarterly earnings, Oracle missed their hardware revenue target on Sun servers. By speaking out, the industry is voicing its concerns about the dubious business practices Oracle is conducting as a way to revive its failing hardware business."
Compared to the original HP press release, Fink is certainly showing more restraint, albeit allowing some self-indulgence by claiming that Oracle has "dubious business practices". Then HP resorted to gathering the opinions of users on an HP community website, which resulted in some strong views being aired.
Some opinions were relatively restrained, such as that of John Vigliecca, VP at Desher Technologies, who said, "If I could tell Oracle something right now it would be that competition is what drives innovation. Don't be afraid of the competition, embrace that, and let's do what's right for our end-user customers." Others were a little more direct, with John Pietro, director of business development at Gibraltar Solutions saying, "You shouldn't use coercion to try to move your clients off a robust, proven platform."
Bill Pederson, a systems consultant with Computer Consulting System Services said that Oracle's decision had led his firm to explore other database options.
This outpouring of anger is the latest salvo fired by HP following Oracle's decision to ditch Itanium. In announcing its decision, Oracle said it was because Intel was focusing effort on x86 chips and that was a statement that gained credence when Intel announced its Westmere EX Xeon chips a couple of weeks later.
Yesterday Kirk Skaugen, VP and general manager of Intel's Data Center Group, said that the next generation Itanium chips, codenamed Poulson, will be launching on time in 2012. Skaugen said that improvements in performance per Watt, reliability, availability and serviceability will be had from the 8-core chip that have 54MB of on-die cache memory.
Given HP's staunch support for Itanium, it is likely that it will the first to offer new Poulson kit. However, with Oracle dropping support, the question is whether anyone will want Itanium architecture Poulson servers. µ
Tags: Hardware
Share this:
Share
Fink hit the nail on the head. This has nothing at all to do with Itanium.
HP's three enterprise class server families all use Itanium; HP-UX, OpenVMS, and NonStop. But Itanium's broader market usage isn't relevant at all. Did any servers use PA-RISC chips besides HP-UX? No. Did any servers use Alpha chips besides Tru64 unix and NonStop? No. Does anyone else use SPARC chips outside of Sun Solaris? No. Does anyone else use IBM POWER7 chips besides IBM AIX? No.
So this has absolutely nothing to do with the hardware CPU chip called Itanium. Rather, this has everything to do with Sun forcing their Oracle HP-UX customers to leave HP, hopefully for Solaris.
This is an Operating System war declared by Sun/Oracle, and has nothing to do with the CPU chip set.
As a customer it's beholden when you spend the money to ensure that you understand the risk you are running. For absolutely ages it's been clear that the Itanium is a dead duck. Intel can't say it publicly but you shouldn't be in IT if you couldn't figure it out yourself.
Therefore as a customer you need to take the correct decisions. This might or might not have meant buying Itanium systems based on your particular cost/application requirements.
As for Oracle they are simply containing their costs and telling us they are not prepared to subsidise this platform. Oracle as a company would probably be happy to talk to HP or Intel continuing to fund the development of Itanim ports to HPUX (which they would be prepared to do if they were serious).
HPUX customer who had any sense already have plan B's in place, they just might end up bringing them forward a bit.