RE: Here Matty Matty Matty!
Oh dear, it looks like the warning about bitterness didn't get through!
"Tell us again about it Mr B, how great is Itanum...." OK, it's great! Actually, as far as Red Hat are concerned, the problem is hp-ux on Itanium is really great, especially in the enterprise which wants a bullet-proof OS for all those really biz crit tasks. Red Hat have been warning us for a while that this was coming as they are simply not making enough moeny out of RHEL on Itanium (we're a RHEL on Itanium customer, with Oracle on top). As it stands, we have plans in place to move what IA RHEL we have to either hp-ux or to RHEL on ProLiant.
".....how much market share will it have as time passes?...." More and more as the competition is now Power or Itanium. And Itanium scores in the really lucrative high-end, not the webserving arena Niagara plays in. Now, try and concentrate and think really hard about this - which do you think hp wants to sell, an hp-ux support contract or an RHEL one with each server? After all, hp is still the leading Linux server vendor by a country mile, so any RHEL moving off Integrity is going onto ProLiant, not Galaxy or Niagara. To be honest, Dell are more likely to be trusted as a server provider for Linux than Soreacle, and IBM's idea of talking Linux is "sell a mainframe, if you can' t sell that then sell AIX on Power, if that doesn't work then try Linux on Power" - they have no drive or direction for high-end Linux, so I presume IBM are simply paying to keep Linux available for Power and swallowing the loss the usual way - by rooking their mainframe customers another ten points. They managed that for a long time on Xseries before they ceded the field to ProLiant.
".....Which other CPU architecture will it kill?...." Well, SPARC is dead, as is Sun, with Soreacle paying lip service to Niagara. Power looks OK for now, but the roadmap isn't exactly packed.
".....And quite how fast did your Superdome run RHEL?..." With Oracle, very fast, thanks, and much faster than anything Sun or IBM could put up against it at the same price. It was an open tender, all three (plus FSC) were asked to put solutions forward, the vendors were allowed to tweak and tune their offerings as they saw fit, and IA RHEL won. In fact, the shootout really turned into an hp-ux vs RHEL affair as both easily outperformed the competition (only AIX-Power came close), hp-ux was faster but RHEL edged it on costs. I'm pretty confident predicting that if the board decides to make a change then it will just shift to hp-ux for those IA servers we have running RHEL. After all, having bought a standard app stack, it will be relatively simple (and hp effectively already paid for the testing in the shootout!).
"......More to the point, how great are HP?...." Hmmm, let's see - still number one Windows server vendor, ditto Linux vendor, and still number one high-end UNIX server vendor. I won't bother with the other areas (storage, print, networking, etc) as I know that reminding you Sunshiners of the narrowness that killed Sun just makes you froth all the more, and I really wouldn't want you crying at Christmas. I just hope Santa brings you a new hp printer for Xmas, as that will really get you squealing!
".....SP&L huh?...." Well, it's hard not to when you Sunshiners are so comic! So, how many times is it you guys have predicted the end of Itanium? Must be at least every quarter for the last nine years! Coincidentally, about the same period as it has been since Sun made a profit - not much chance of that now. Before you get too excited, consider a few things - firstly, hp have been driving the IA version of Linux for years, so - if the feel the need - they could push another distie, such as Oracle's own; secondly, Linux is still more strategic to Oracle than Slowaris, even with Sun's laughable Linux-clone Slowaris x86; thirdly, RH are Larry's enemies, not firends, whilst he still sells five times as many Oracle licenses on new hp servers than Sun kit, even if only on ProLiants, which means hp are his bestest buddies (ever wonder why all Larry's public attacks are on IBM?). Oh, I thik there are still plenty of other people pointing and laughing at you guys, and most of them probably work at hp. As it is, my own arm is starting to ache as you guys have given so many years of hilarity - haven't you all dried up and blown away yet?
/SP&L, with a Merry Christmas to all!