“If you run Itanium-based servers in your data center, 2010 has a surprise for you. The dominant supplier of commercial Linux, Red Hat, is not going to be supporting its future Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 on any Itanium platforms, old or new.”
“If you run Itanium-based servers in your data center, 2010 has a surprise for you. The dominant supplier of commercial Linux, Red Hat, is not going to be supporting its future Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 on any Itanium platforms, old or new.”
… so this is no surprise.
and I’m sure SGI will support their existing RH customers.
Else, you’re probably already running HP-UX instead, so who cares?
… or OpenVMS.
I don’t think even Windows supports IA-64 any more, right?
windows still suports Itanium. this makes me sad as my Itanium set up was a tripple boot system with Windows server 2008 R2, OpenVMS, and Red Hat linux. Red hat was by far the most somplete of the Itanium distros, so its sad to see it go
. though if itanium plans on staying relivent Intel needs to get out some new chips and fast
You say Red Hat was the most complete… are you sure? What is in Red Hat that isn’t present in SLES? Just curious.
quality of support we received as well as application stability on the system (out of box).
Its been supporting Itanium for a long time and will continue to.
Hell its still support 68000 series processors.
I don’t think your definition of “support” is the same as Red Hat’s.
itanium is dead anyway…
In fact, you are just fine all the way to 2014 or 2017 depending on where you got your hardware.
Red Hat is committed to protecting Itanium customers’ investments and to providing these customers with enterprise class support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 through March 2014. During this period, Red Hat will provide support, deliver new features, and enable new Itanium hardware in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 exclusively in accordance with the published RHEL product lifecycle (http://www.redhat.com/security/updates/errata/).
In addition, extended support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 for Itanium is available up to March 2017 from selected OEMs.
The next major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (v6) will not provide support for the Itanium architecture; consequently, all Itanium related development will be incorporated into Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 exclusively.
It’s interesting to note that the CentOS team (who rebuild RHEL without the Red Hat name/logos) dropped the Itanium platform (in fact, all platforms other than Intel 32/64-bit) when they released CentOS 5. Could this have contributed to the decision by Red Hat to drop Itanium for RHEL 6?
I suspect the CentOS team did it simply for reasons of manpower/hardware availability – they have limited resources and have to concentrate on the most popular platforms. Without CentOS 5 on Itanium, there was no way to easily test RHEL 5 on Itanium without paying (at least for the final release) and that could have resulted in a drop in RHEL 5 Itanium subscriptions.
To be honest, the Itanium 2 platform is too expensive and too slow for general purpose server use – it has a niche in the area of floating point operations, but even Red Hat agree that niche isn’t profitable enough to continue developing for.
Red Hat dropping Itanium is a major blow for the platform – you suspect RHEL 5 was as big a seller as Windows Server 2008 on the Itanium platform (does anyone know the Itanium sales figures of those two?). It looks like Itanium Enterprise Linux was handed lock, stock and barrel to Novell with its SuSE Enterprise distro…time will tell how long that one lasts too (no word from Novell on Itanium SuSE 12 yet). I think this marks the beginning of the end of Itanium as a Linux platform, IMHO.
I seriously doubt it. It’s hard to imagine an organization deciding upon Itanium servers and then making their deployment OS choice based upon what they can try for free. After all, RHEL for Itanium is only $349.