Re: [rhelv5-list] Itanium support ...

Re: [rhelv5-list] Itanium support ...

[Zoran Popović]

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The problem is they won't start dying, they were made not to - it was meant
to support what (mission) critical business is ... but I am not here for
that.

I would like to hear, people, what do you think the future of commercial
linux distros on Itanium is one hand, and on the other - what is the future
of Xen in commercial distros ?
Is Xen going to be supported on Suse on Itanium in future ?
What #$%&! is going on ?

Red Hat is the most respectable player having linux as business model, and
so to say it is the leader in open source community. But it has given
confusing signals about Xen, and now Itanium. I should've understood better
what happened with cowboyhat linux and fedora ... nevertheless, what I have
is a comitted software vendor like SAP who supports open source (as much a
proprietary one can - SAP supports officially trend of moving from Unix to
Linux), and Oracle does, too (with Sun and human power involved in Xen on
ia64 additionally) - it is not a small thing to have official support for
Xen or KVM virtualization by a big name such as SAP, and many commercial
distros (they have to be like that because of the nature of the business)
including Red Hat and Suse. Now I find that HP supports on their highly
competitive BladeSystem matrix control software only VMWare, Hyper-V and
XenServer - KVM and Xen not even announced, while Red Hat is involved in
making Insight Orchestration Designer templates for RHEL, JBoss and stuff
(something like virtual appliances, but story is bigger than that) but not
with RHEV ?!?! Is that the price of abandoning Xen in RHEL6 (HP treats that
as a clear signal), and leaving Itanium after that was a bit scary ... I've
been browsing through SAP sd2tier, TPC-C and TPC-H benchmarks and now I am
even more convinced that something wrong is going on. I can understand that
market share is important, but different vendors (including SAP) obviously
have different perspectives (Intel has more or less equal income from ia64
and non-ia64, so it is here to stay !!!), and I won't tell now how it
actually looks like to me ... I think that HP lost good competitors, but
above all, I am afraid that important part of open source community is in a
bigger loss ... __"I feel blue"__ ...

ZP.

PS.

Just look what I have here, tell me what you think, and more is coming on
very soon:

      http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/17592

2010/1/16 t35t0r <t35t0r@gmail.com>

> 2010/1/15 Zoran Popović <shoom013@gmail.com>:
> > I feel deceived :( ... Itanium is not going to be supported after March
> 2014
> > and in RHEL 6 ?!!?!?!! I know this probably is a bit late reaction, I
> have
> > also a SR open with this question and a business case officially
> documented
> > in my company (I can send it gladly to anyone interested) with proposal
> > based on RHEL and HP Integrity blades (Itanium). I will open another SR
> if
>
> Sure, I'm interested in looking at your business case. We have two SGI
> itanium altix 350's (8 node/16p total) and another with 2 nodes/4p and
> all I know is that replacement parts are expensive, the warranty
> contracts are expensive, and the systems are expensive, and they have
> a bigger rack and environmental footprint. The 1.5GHz 16p system has
> lower performance than a single node 16p 2.93GHz Xeon nehalem system
> (for our computational work loads). Let's just say we're not replacing
> the itaniums as the nodes start dieing. Ours used to run RHEL3 but SGI
> made us switch to SLES9 or 10, perhaps that's another option if you
> really want itanium support (don't know about novell's plans).
>
> In any case, even SGI's new "UV" large shared memory/many cores system
> uses nehalem CPUs.
>
> HTH
>
> _______________________________________________
> rhelv5-list mailing list
> rhelv5-list@redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/rhelv5-list
>

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Re: [rhelv5-list] Itanium support ...

[Pasi Kärkkäinen]

On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 12:50:46PM +0100, Zoran Popovi? wrote:
>    The problem is they won't start dying, they were made not to - it was
>    meant to support what (mission) critical business is ... but I am not here
>    for that.
> 
>    I would like to hear, people, what do you think the future of commercial
>    linux distros on Itanium is one hand, and on the other - what is the
>    future of Xen in commercial distros ?
>    Is Xen going to be supported on Suse on Itanium in future ?
>    What #$%&! is going on ?
>

RHEL5 fully supports Xen, so Redhat will support Xen at least until 2014,
which is when RHEL5 goes EOL.

atm it looks like RHEL6 won't have Xen (dom0) included. RHEL6 will run as Xen domU (guest).

Novell SLES11 ships with Xen, and they seem to be actively working with Xen,
so I expect Novell continues to ship Xen in future products.
 
-- Pasi

Re: Re: [rhelv5-list] Itanium support ...

[Zoran Popović]

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But AFAIK SLES on Itanium doesn't have Xen (you can build it manually and
unsupported) ...

2010/2/16 Pasi Kärkkäinen <pasik@iki.fi>

> ...
> Novell SLES11 ships with Xen, and they seem to be actively working with
> Xen,
> so I expect Novell continues to ship Xen in future products.
>
> -- Pasi
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> Xen-users@lists.xensource.com
> http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users
>

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Re: [rhelv5-list] Itanium support ...

[Zoran Popović]

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2010/2/16 Tom Sightler <ttsig@tuxyturvy.com>

> ...
>
> Still, comparisons based solely on "revenue" does fairly represent
> market share from Redhat's perspective.  Even if revenue was somehow
> equal, $300 million would be what, probably a few thousand EPIC servers,
> but that same amount would equate to 10's of thousands of x86 servers
>

or 10's of thousands of blade systems (even bl870s which are high-end in
that range at the moment only for shortly, while smaller HP Integrity blades
cost not much more than Xeon-based Proliants - I don't know if people around
this are aware of that, and that new Itaniums will use same motherboard
chipsets as new Xeons) ...
... or a couple of unknown IBM mainframes, whatever.


> because they cost so much less per unit.  Redhat has to make enough
> profit of the sheer number of machines, not how much money those
> machines costs.  It's quite likely that Redhat would be willing to keep
> Itanium support around as long as customers were willing to pay 10x more
> than x86 customers for support, but my guess is they are not, so Redhat
> looks at it and says it's a market where they can't make money.  Markets
> that don't make money are not good markets.
>
>
sorry, I didn't know that leaders still follow mainly and only that old
fashioned rule to make as much as possible with the shortest time-to-value
... I also thought that we got past beyond tribal wars. Even if it's so, it
all gives me the chills, the fact I've learned so far that M$ boosted AMD
fire, that Oracle through glove into IBM's face with million dollar prize
about database machine, that HP is indifferent toward open source and that
Red Hat decided to abandon Xen as one of the moving spirits of the open
source - why ? Other mature virtualization platforms don't have open source
base, and business doesn't like often changes and bleeding edge ... I
remember the ramblings on fedora forums, but I still think it all happened
to fast ...


> You might wonder why they still support IBM Power and System/z which
> likely also have similar market share and that would be a valid
> question, but my guess would be that IBM provides some financial
> incentive to do so.
>
>
Incentives, incentives ... I have to use that word more often ... I know
that even Linus Torvalds mentioned price and real life put as the knife in
Itanium's (Intel's ?) back, but is it really all just about market shares
and price ? Did really all good things come from that ? Maybe it wouldn't be
10x more, but yes - customer would be willing to pay more for Red Hats
support, that is the point I was selling in my company, too (it really is a
good service, sincerely, and you probably wouldn't even dream what are they
all willing to pay for instead) - in time it could be corrected if that was
all the problem, the support subscription price. I am truly sad if it is so,
silly HP lost healthy competition, fat cats got fatter, some people lost
good business and open source lost possible incentives ... if I ever become
a manager ...


> Later,
> Tom
>
>
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>

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