Canonical Kills Ubuntu Maverik Meerkat (10.10) for Itanium (and Sparc)

It wasn’t long ago that Red Hat and Microsoft released statements that they would no longer support Itanium (with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Windows respectively). Now Canonical has announced that Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Long Term Support) will be the last supported Ubuntu on not only Itanium, but Sparc as well.

Itanium has thus lost three major operating systems (Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Windows, and Ubuntu Linux) over the past year. For HP Itanium owners, this means that Integrity Virtual Machines (IVMs) running Red Hat Linux or Microsoft Windows Server will no longer have support from HP (since the operating system designer has ceased support).

The only bright spot for HP’s IVM is OpenVMS 8.4, which is supported under an IVM for the first time. However, response to OpenVMS 8.4 has been mixed.

Martin Hingley has an interesting article about how the dropping of RHEL and Windows Server from Itanium will not affect HP; I disagree. For HP’s virtual infrastructure – based on the IVM product – the two biggest environments besides HP-UX are no longer available. An interesting survey would be to find out how many IVMs are being used and what operating systems they are running now and in the future.

With the loss of Red Hat and Microsoft – and now Canonical’s Ubuntu – this provides just that many fewer options for IVMs – and thus, fewer reasons to use an HP IVM. OpenVMS could pick up the slack, as many shops may be looking for a way to take OpenVMS off the bare metal, letting the hardware be used for other things.

If HP IVMs are used less and less, this could affect the Superdome line as well, as running Linux has always been a selling point for this product. As mentioned before, this may be offset by OpenVMS installations.

This also means that Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server becomes the only supported mainstream Linux environment on Itanium – on the Itanium 9100 processor at least.

From the other side, HP’s support for Linux seems to be waning: this statement can be found in the fine print on their Linux on Integrity page:

HP is not planning to certify or support any Linux distribution on the new Integrity servers based on the Intel Itanium processor 9300 series.

Even if HP doesn’t feel the effect of these defections, the HP’s IVM product family (and Superdome) probably will.

Intel Itanium Tukwila CPU Out Soon?

ComputerWorld reports that Intel has started shipping the Itanium Tukwila processor. The Itanium processor drives the HP Integrity line of servers, as well as the HP NonStop servers.

In the near future (2nd or 3rd quarter?) HP is expected to announce Integrity servers based on the Tukwila processor. These new servers are predicted to be blade servers, and it is also suggested that Superdome will receive a complete overhaul – which is uncomfortably close to suggesting a “forklift upgrade” (i.e., pull out the entire server and replace) for Superdome. The Superdome system infrastructure is 10 years old, so it may be time – but an expensive upgrade like that is never welcome.

At the International Solid-State Circuits Conference next week, both Sun (UltraSPARC “Rainbow Falls”) and IBM (Power 7) are expected to announce new chips. Some coverage of both these chips went on at the HotChips Conference in August; ExtremeTech covered both chips well in its conference preview. In September, the Register managed to snap up a copy of the Sun SPARC roadmap; it shows the Rainbow Falls chip being introduced in 2010. As for Tukwila, Intel is rumored to be making the formal announcement of Tukwila at the ISSC.

We shall see…

Whither Sun Microsystems?

The recent fourth quarter reports from server manufacturers was dim, and Sun Microsystems was by far the worst (with a 35% loss compared to the same period last year). On top of this, Sun just announced in October (within their 8K filing for the SEC) intentions to lay off 3000 employees in the next 12 months. Infoworld also had a nice piece on this; according to Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, the company is losing $100 million each month the European Union regulators put off accepting the merger.

With the Oracle acquisition in progress, there are a lot of questions about the future viability of Sun Microsystems, and of some of its products.

I don’t think people realize just how important the Sun group of products are, and what an impact it would have if most – or even some – of the products were cancelled. Consider this list of Sun products:

• Java.
• Solaris – and OpenSolaris.
• SPARC – and OpenSPARC.
• MySQL. There was a recent report from the 451 Group that suggests that usage of MySQL may fall off based on the current uncertainty around Sun.
• StarOffice – and OpenOffice.
• VirtualBox (and associated virtual products). Virtualbox also has an open source version, and was just updated to version 3.1 with new features. InformationWeek and eWeek both had excellent articles on the new Virtualbox.
• Sun Modular Data Centers (originally with the codename Project Blackbox).
• The Lustre Filesystem.

Most of the most popular products were mentioned by Oracle in their Sun Acquisition FAQ (PDF), stating that they will increase money spent on each over what Sun spent. These products include: Java, Solaris, SPARC, StarOffice, NetBeans, virtualization products, Glassfish, and MySQL. Other products were not mentioned – such as Lustre, the Modular Data Center, and others.

The list above also does not list the technologies that were spearheaded by Sun – and some still are: ZFS, NFS, NIS (and NIS+), dtrace, containers, and smc.

It would be unfortunate – and materially significant – if Sun were to go under or if any of the majority of their products were to be cancelled. One can only hope this does not happen…