Itanium: Dance with the one that brought you?

Posted on July 13, 2011 by Darin Stahl

When Oracle announced last March that it had ceased all development work related to  Intel’s Itanium process the announcement also reminded the IT community that the Itanium chip exists at all.  

Oracle at the time said that Intel’s “management” had made it clear to them [Oracle] that their strategic focus would be on the x86 microprocessor and that Itanium was nearing the end of life.  Whether the characterization of some backroom conversation is accurate or not or, even if that matches the Intel roadmap for the Itanium (Intel has two more processors “Poulson” and “Kittson” on the current roadmap) –  the fact is that without software to run on it the hardware platform is nearing an end.

Oracle’s cut and run from the Itanium platform wasn’t the first.  Both Microsoft and RedHat abandoned the platform previously.  Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 and Enterprise Linux 6 will be the last Operating Systems from those vendors respectively to support Itanium.  

However, IBM executives have stated publicly that they will continue to support IBM DB2 on Itanium until at least the end of Intel’s current product roadmap.  Which may make IBM DB2 a good alternative for enterprises wishing to continue on the Itanium for the near term.

While the market share was never large, Intel continues to execute its roadmap for Itanium chips (with the Itanium 9300 release and the two future chips on the way) and the HP Business Critical Systems group continues to support them with a new Itanium Blade System and the Superdome line.

So what are other enterprises doing about the Itanium platform choice?  

1)      Stay the course.   Most will continue to run existing Oracle deployments with ongoing Oracle support.   They will wait for the “magic moment” when the business conditions warrant an upgrade to the enterprise software and functionality.  At that time they intend revisit the platform decision.

2)      Change to IBM DB2.   Some – and IBM is working hard to support these customers in doing so – will move off the Oracle DB platform to IBM DB2 and continue as is.   

3)      Stop Dancing.   A few enterprises are already in a spot where the business conditions warrant an upgrade to the software and functionality.   That process is leading them to a new application/software platform for the business needs which is not the Itanium platform in-house.  Info-Tech has seen customers in this situation:

• Move to “commodity” platforms in large scale deployments.
• Adopt Software-As-A-Service for the required business functionality needs
• Deploy other non-commodity platforms such as IBM i /iSeries  (IBM shipments of iSeries boxes are up considerably),  Solaris/Unix (Oracle is offering significant discounting on the maintenance/support costs for a Solaris/Sun platform. Such that over a 6-year TCO comparison it’s cheaper than running Oracle on Windows using commodity hardware). 

It is fine to dance with the one that brought you.   The key is to make sure that when the music stops you’re not left on a silent dance floor swaying back and forth all alone.

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