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Red Hat, HP, Intel Join in Itanium Linux Alliance
joel_archer writes "According to this Yahoo! article, Red Hat will begin selling an Itanium version of its Advanced Server Linux in partnership with HP. This is one of partnerships currently underway between these two companies. HP is a key partner for anything Itanium-related, the company invented the design underlying Itanium before handing it off to Intel to develop and manufacture. Bolstering that effort, Red Hat and HP have signed a deal under which Advanced Server will be certified on and available with all of HP's Intel-based ProLiant servers--not just Itanium systems, but also lower-end Xeon and Pentium versions and superthin 'blade' systems."
Pretty remarkable machine, although if you consider that software is usually almost as expensive as the hardware it's no surprise that it's a bargain. But I'll match the reliability with any of the other machines we've used in the past. Everybody agrees that it's faster than the last one (well, of course!) So yeah, I'd recommend one of these to anybody who wants to increase the overall speed and reliability of their platform without breaking the bank.
I recently download the 7.3 iso's for free. I still get free upgrade support from Redhat. I usually run the upgrade on weekends or late at nite, because I have been bumped off during the week if there are high loads on the system. But I am usually able to sustain d/l speeds of 150 KB/s. Not bad for free.
Q. Did you ever say, as has been widely circulated on the Internet, "640K [of RAM] ought to be enough for anybody?"
No! That makes me so mad I can't believe it! Do you realize the pain the industry went through while the IBM PC was limited to 640K? The machine was going to be 512K at one point, and we kept pushing it up. I never said that statement-I said the opposite of that.
Looks like your link mentions another of his denials, too, but you should have mentioned the apocryphality (is that a word?) of the quote.
UNIX: about a decade across their whole market.
Actually, it's a lot less than a decade for most UNIX vendors.
DEC had 64-bits first; 1992/1993 I believe, with SGI not too long afterwards. So the two guys with lowest marketshare were pretty fast out of the blocks. But where were things a few years ago? By late 1998, all the RISC vendors had at least one 64-bit piece of hardware, with half of Sun and HP's product lines moved over, IBM just starting, and SGI shipping all 64-bit hardware. But various players hadn't finished all the OS-level stuff to support that. (Source for all that here.) The transition to 64-bits wasn't done for UNIX players even 3.5 years ago, so "across their whole market" is really way too strong a statement. Wintel ran on 64-bit Alpha support long ago, but actual 64-bit APIs were still in development back in that timeframe; I haven't seen how far along they are now.
At one point in my career, I analyzed 64 bit marketing for several projects. Basically, saying "we're 64-bit, they aren't" was never a very compelling argument to begin with. Sure, in a few cases (very large databases, but not very very large databases) it made a difference, but at the end of the day, it didn't win any hardware players a lot of business.
Saying "64-bit is better" is easy, showing that 64-bit is worth paying more money is typically hard.
You're right that 64-bit Intel will likely win over 64-bit RISC long-term is right. But Intel is having huge problems executing on 64-bit Intel stuff. Itanium was a loser. We'll see how competitive McKinley is.
Right now, and I suspect for some time to come, Sun and SGI will continue to sell better hardware primarily based on "more reliable", "more scalable" kinds of features within the hardware (as usual, features requiring OS support), not leaning too heavily on the 64-bit argument.
--LP