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HP Asks Judge To Enforce Itanium Contract Vs. Oracle
Dupple writes with this quote from a Reuters report:
"Hewlett-Packard Co told a judge on Tuesday that Oracle Corp should be ordered to make its software available on HP's Itanium-based servers for as long as HP sells them. Lawyers for HP and Oracle presented closing arguments in a California state court for the first phase in a bitter lawsuit between the two tech giants. ... Oracle decided to stop developing software for use with Itanium last year, saying Intel made it clear that the chip was nearing the end of its life and was shifting its focus to its x86 microprocessor. But HP said it had an agreement with Oracle that support for Itanium would continue, without which the equipment using the chip would become obsolete. HP said that commitment was affirmed when it settled a lawsuit over Oracle's hiring of ousted HP chief executive Mark Hurd. HP seeks up to $4 billion in damages."
The Itanic is sinking!
John
Apparently its being sustained by the booming GCOS 8 market. Those two customers must be very happy.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
he extends sympathies.
--- Do you believe in the day?
HP seeks up to $4 billion in damages.
Years ago when the itanic was sinking, I heard shipping estimates as low as 200K processors annually. I'm sure its lower now. But that implies something on the order of $20K damages per processor shipped, which is astounding.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Can somone opine as to why exactly HP is doing this ? What do they hope to get ? Why dont they simply cut n run, and/or move HP-UX to x86 as they've already proven to themselves that it can run on x86.
Corporations are weird.
The plural of anecdote is not evidence.
Okay, there's no way that product line is worth anything like that.
I guess you could argue that the damage to the company could push it over the edge. Hard to keep a straight face, but that's not required in court. But regardless that would be HP's problem and not something (I hope) you could extend to a supplier.
And yeah lawyers are expensive but still not that bad yet.
Is there no way to have batshit-level unrealistic damage demands considered contempt of court? I don't like that we're paying for this. (Both in coin, and tying up our limited court resources.)
An Mac Book Itanium would sell more units than anyone could produce.
HP sold Itanium boxes to customers who use them to run Oracle. Oracle stops supporting Itanium and the customers are stuck holding computers that don't do what they paid for them to do.
There's probably penalties in HPs contracts with their customers in the event of such a circumstance. Or maybe they just don't want their customers to feel like HP screwed them.
paintball
I don't know what HP's plans were BEFORE Oracle dumped Itanium support but according to the HP-UX support maxtrix from February 2012, they will support some Itanium systems until 2018. I don't know if they killed any products early due to lack of Oracle software support but without Oracle support, I would bet there is every reason for many of the Itanium users to (1) cancel any planned Itanium purchases and (2) drop the existing ones. With them being taken out of service, HP loses revenue. It's a lot of money but it likely forced them to kill a product line early and encouraged existing more or less happy users to bail earlier than HP planned.
http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/downloads/public_hp-ux_systems_support.pdf?jumpid=ex_R1533_us/en/large/eb/go/hpuxservermatrix
Why would you even think of damages in terms of "per processor shipped" (and, even worse, in terms of annual processor shipments)? Even assuming the estimates you refer to are accurate, the computation you make is meaningless.
The original Itanium was a disaster, the second generation was what the first should have been but wasn't, the third actually looks very respectable. Intel would be stupid to eliminate a product they've actually got functional.
And for high-end use, the Itanium is a genuinely useful CPU. Because the performance of a cluster is a function of the communication delays, very high-end clusters WANT to have very high-end CPUs. You can only do so much with piles of PCs before the inefficiencies due to (a) distance and (b) an inefficient architecture really set in. There's also (c) - a crap instruction set - but the Itanium doesn't help much there because although it is somewhat better, nobody has built a particularly good compiler for it yet. Optimization on the Itanium remains a challenge.
Admittedly, it's not the design I would have chosen - I far prefer many of the design decisions made in the Inmos Transputer and the Intel iWarp, since those were designed specifically for the purpose of clustering and started from that position. I also prefer the elegance of the MIPS64 instruction set over the unnecessary burden of anything Intel has done, but again I'm in the minority. I'd also have threaded compute elements and produced virtual cores, rather than threaded instructions on physical cores, since threading the compute elements would allow you to distribute the heat better, wouldn't prevent you accessing elements that are wholly independent of those in use and would reduce unnecessary swapping. But what do I know, I've only been observing what actually works vs what the customers want for 35 years. Customers are just as stupid as beancounters and pointy-haired bosses.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I can't stand either company, for different reasons, and have absolutely no interest in Itanium. I have a hard time picking someone to root for in this... I guess I'll have to go with HP. Go, HP! Only because (a) it's entertaining, and (b) it causes problems for Oracle.
If Oracle counter-sues, I can always root for Oracle.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Any chance that they will both lose?
A boy can dream...
If Oracle doesn't want to support it on your platform, you can do it yourself. For less than $4 billion, anyway...
Since HP hasn't really been spending any cash to innovate with HP-UX, and still has many what I'd consider bugs in the OS, there's really no reason for anyone with a modern OS mindset to use HP-UX. It's only for legacy apps in my opinion. Legacy apps don't need updates or upgrades - they need to continue to run until the wheels fall off.
I see HP's Itanium line going the way of their PA-RISC line of HP-9000 servers, as well as MPE. PA-RISC at least had something going for it - as did the DEC-Alpha systems they pretty well killed.
Sorry HP, but you are a has-been nobody today.
It seems to me that HP would be better off sinking this money into contributions to PostgreSQL / EnterpriseDB; it already offers a ton of Oracle compatibility, and runs on HP-UX: http://enterprisedb.com/products-services-training/products/postgres-plus-advanced-server/advanced-server-oracle-features
Make oracle pay. Larry Ellison doesn't need to buy Lana'i.
I've read that the Itanium has hardware partitioning and redundancy features that the x86 still doesn't have. If lives are on the on the line and cost was not a barrier it would be easy choice to make. If Oracle won't support HPUX on Itanium, why does anyone think they'll support it on HPUx86. Oracle is being a bitch and has also increased licensing costs so many customers have been caught out by this. This is a big pissing match with customers losing out.
If Oracle get forced to support Itanium I wonder what quality software they will actually make ?
http://multx.ru
What a slap in the face. Hp or Microsoft?
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wiht U320 devices, there are 15 allowed devices per chain besides the adapter, and under HP/UX the scsi priority is 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1,0, 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, and 8. Multiple HBA can be on the same bus and those are assigned the highest priority numbers.
These two customers haven't been pwned by Chinese Intel, different to everybody else.
..because Oracle is a disloyal POS ?? Makes a lot of sense.
..but it was David Packard's fault to believe into the "good managers can manage everything" meme. He should never have made Lew Platt CEO. This man outsourced the CPU R&D to Intel and compiler R&D to some random Indians, IIRC.
Itanium is generally considered to be in the same rough performance "ballpark" as x86. If you can't make it run properly on Itanium+HPUX, it is probably your incompetence. I was once an HP employee (until 1997) and their machines were always competitive. Why do you think they have (historically) been so successfully ? Only because of their superior salesforce ?
I am telling you a secret; their PA-RISC CPUs were performance leaders in the mid-nineties.
I doubt any customer would have moved from HP to the snail-fast SPARC abominations. Maybe to IBM, that sounds plausible.
Also, for most software vendors, Itanium support was just a matter of rebuilding their app on the new hardware. I remember running all sorts of GNU tools on HPUX / PA RISC and all of it worked just nice. Gcc to ghostview.
Ideally, I wish Alpha and PA-RISC were released by HP/Intel in terms of whoever owns their IP, and be made into open-source CPU architectures, like OpenRISC/OpenCORE. That way, let IHVs revisit their designs, work on improving them, and then, if other vendors want to make some specialized legacy-compatible platforms, like AlphaServers for OVMS, they'd have a chance. In the case of MIPS, I believe that b/w what MIPS is doing, and what OpenRISC is doing, they have a lot covered, although there too, having the MIPS IV & V architectures opened up would be good.
I really wish choice in CPUs and OSs would come back.
Actually, there is a couple of Chinese companies - Inspur and Huawei - who have recently introduced systems based on that. They are Inspur and Huawei.
HP had acquired 2 VLIW pioneer companies - Multiflow and Cyrdrome - and was doing R&D into VLIW compilers. The partnership w/ Intel happened when there were a number of RISC challengers threatening to take on Intel in the market - Alpha (w/ NT), PPC (w/ Mac OS and OS/2-PPC). HP saw this threat from IBM and DEC, who were its main rivals at the time, and decided to align w/ Intel on theis VLIW project, which was supposed to replace both PA-RISC and Pentiums.
The first one happened b'cos it turned out that emulating PA-RISC was not such a major hit on performance. But emulating x86 was. And once AMD came up w/ the x64 architecture, it was curtains for Itanium: even the FOSS people preferred the x64 to it. The performance issues of the Itanium 1 didn't help, and very quickly, it became as unique to HP as Sparc is to Oracle or POWER is to IBM.