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HP Asks Judge To Enforce Itanium Contract Vs. Oracle

Posted by Soulskill on from the oracle-making-a-play-for-more-courtroom-marketshare dept.

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."

35 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. SOS by plover · · Score: 4, Funny

    The Itanic is sinking!

    --
    John
  2. The ghost of Ken Olsen called, by soupforare · · Score: 4, Insightful

    he extends sympathies.

    --
    --- Do you believe in the day?
  3. damages per processor by vlm · · Score: 3, Informative

    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
    1. Re:damages per processor by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Where I work, we use Alpha, and have investigated moving to Itanium, but with this debacle, we won't make the move, as we use also Oracle. I won't discuss actual numbers, but $20,000 per CPU is in the ballpark of our annual support costs (if you include hardware and software). At some point we will either port or rewrite, and in either case, it won't be an HP platform we land on, but we may still use Oracle for the database. This case has very real implications for HP, and hurts them more than it hurts Oracle.

    2. Re:damages per processor by moderatorrater · · Score: 3, Funny

      Maybe for the student version.

    3. Re:damages per processor by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      One of our customer bought some Itanium servers from HP, 3-year old unused hardware, they must have done a deal they couldn't refuse. Then the Oracle wouldn't run fast enough and of course it was our problem, us being the software vendor. After expensive CPU upgrades and everything else, it still runs like a dog. For the fraction of the money, they could have got some intel kit and run Linux with 10x performance.

  4. Existing Customers by raehl · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Existing Customers by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

      Even if HP forces Oracle to continue software development how much effort will they really put into it? If some critical bug only affects Itanium how many resources will be thrown at it?

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    2. Re:Existing Customers by Bert64 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      HP have been screwing their customers for a while already...
      Killing PA-RISC and Alpha, forcing customers onto IA64 which now looks like it will die soon too...
      With each processor transition, customers at the very least have to recompile their code or run it under slow emulation...

      Sun and IBM snapped up a lot of customers from HP over the IA64 transition, and i fully expect them to do the same when HP finally abandons IA64 and moves its customers onto something else.

      Introducing a new, incompatible CPU was never going to work...

      Too much code is only available in binary form, and so ran on ia64 very slowly under emulation. Vendors had no incentive to port their code because there were so few users, and users had no incentive to buy into the architecture because there was no software. Who wants to pay 5 times more for a cpu that when saddled with emulation is actually slower than the cheaper cpus?

      The hardware was never cheap enough to attract hobbyist developers, so even open source code was often not well tested on them (nor are new risc cpus from other vendors, but old ones can be had cheaply). Had the hardware been cheap, it would have gained a lot more traction in the linux market at least.

      --
      http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
    3. Re:Existing Customers by Kozar_The_Malignant · · Score: 2

      >Or maybe they just don't want their customers to feel like HP screwed them.

      Where, in the last three years, can you find a customer who doesn't feel screwed by HP?

      --
      Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
  5. Re:Why exactly ? by Sique · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Because they have contracts with their customers guaranteering them continued software support. And if the main supplier stops software support, those contracts become quite shaky.

    --
    .sig: Sique *sigh*
  6. damages per processor ... WHY? by DragonWriter · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    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.

  7. Re:Why exactly ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Considering that ditching Itanic would mean porting HP-UX, NonStop OS, and VMS, it would be a non-trivial exercise. First, you have to port the OS. Then you have to either write a compatibility layer (similar to Apple's Rosetta), or port all of the applications, including those you didn't write yourself. Given the tendency of business to not want to spend more money than they have to, the former is more likely in the short term.

    There's also the political issues involved with abandoning a significant hardware lineup. Sure, there was a seven year overlap between Itanic and PA-RISC on the HP-UX side, but no customer is going to be happy about such a move. Compare with IBM; they've been doing POWER for two decades, and no end in sight. Or Oracle and SPARC, for that matter.

    In my blunt opinion, if HP tries to move HP-UX to x86, it'll mark a major marketing campaign from IBM and Oracle about a company that won't stand behind its hardware, and they will bleed (more) marketshare.

    This whole thing is not going to end well.

  8. Itanium 3 is a decent CPU by jd · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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)
    1. Re:Itanium 3 is a decent CPU by multiplexo · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Yeah, it's too bad to see it go. I ran an SGI Altix 3000 at a previous job and it was a screaming box, very elegantly designed and designed for massive clustering. NASA had a cluster of 10,240 Itaniums using the SGI Altix architecture, and it wasn't a weird, one-off hack. You could have duplicated it if you had the money and the space. I think that not having an affordable way for hobbyists to build their own Itanium workstations really hurt Intel. If Intel, or someone else, had come out with an affordable motherboard for building a single or dual CPU system more people could have built their own systems, as they do with x86, and seen what the chip was capable of. What Intel has accomplished with the x86 is impressive, but how long can it go on?

      --
      cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
    2. Re:Itanium 3 is a decent CPU by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      When I was at Sun, and Sun's first Opteron boxes came out, we were told that we lost that NASA contract to SGI because intel paid SGI to give the cluster away for free to NASA (for the publicity) and only to charge for the support...

      The itanic was never that great, even compared to the first Opterons (which used less power and ran cooler too). It was effectively a large DSP and no one (no engineers) in the industry outside of intel took it seriously. It was only ever going to be any good at highly-predictable numerical workloads due to the limitations of the instruction set. The "good" compilers that it was to require would never appear since you can't write a compiler that can predict the future.

      The other benefits of itanic such as the large caches, multiple cores, wide registers and fast interconnects were already available on other CPUs... including the Alpha it killed and the Opteron/AMD64 that we have today.

    3. Re:Itanium 3 is a decent CPU by cheesybagel · · Score: 2

      Bulldozer basically does what processors like Niagara did before i.e. it shares the FPU among cores to reduce die space. It works marvelously for web servers or java applications servers i.e. multi-threaded integer applications but sucks for everything else.

    4. Re:Itanium 3 is a decent CPU by Teresita · · Score: 2

      NASA had a cluster of 10,240 Itaniums using the SGI Altix architecture, and it wasn't a weird, one-off hack. They used it as a CGI render farm for their fake Mars rover program.

    5. Re:Itanium 3 is a decent CPU by jd · · Score: 2

      To be fair to Inmos, the Transputer was really only competing with big iron - no, I do not take the Transputer module for the Amiga seriously.

      Even if it had simply evolved into a networking chip (rather than a DVD processor, which is what actually happened), the modern world spends a couple of grand on individual high-end SCI interconnects (which are essentially ptp serial links), which are distributed over an entire PCI card rather than being a system-on-a-chip. Being able to replace four such boards with one wafer would seem extremely desirable. It should certainly be faster, since all variables are the same bar the one of the Transputer being on a single die. The same goes for the iWarp.

      If you want to compare apples with something that is still vaguely apple-shaped and within the category of fruit-like, then look at the sheer difficulty anyone has had superscaling the Intel processors. SGI managed it and went bust. Other than that, not many vendors have ever gone beyond sixteen-way. In comparison, Cambridge Computers were chucking thousands of Transputers into a single crate. IIRC, this was a Clive "people want washing-machine-motor cars" Sinclair operation we're talking about, which means it has to have been easy enough for him to comprehend. That's.... ....not terribly demanding on the gray-cells. (He's in MENSA, but I can only imagine it's because they were using a Sinclair-made watch to time the test.)

      Agreed, the actual T400 and T800 had architectural flaws and the iWarp had problems, but modern clusters are merely the same concept done over multiple motherboards with MPI-2.1's ghastly API to handle most of the data transfer. There's no intrinsic reason why a SoC version could not be the equal or superior, it merely requires a slightly larger die and a slightly better design.

      Ok, what about the general case for virtual cores? Well, the reasoning is that applications place different demands on the CPU. Skype, Tor and Firefox are not equal in their needs, for example. People tend to run a mishmash of programs, it's actually quite rare to run many programs that happen to have identical needs. So rare even in games consoles that IBM opted for a hybrid architecture in their Cell design rather than try to make multiple cores that could do everything well.

      In big iron, people tend to write SIMD code because you can't do MIMD on a heterogeneous cluster very well. With virtual cores, it would be the other way round - you'd be able to do MIMD far better than SIMD, since you could divide the processor elements up into more groups. So the question then becomes whether real-world problems are SIMD or MIMD. Since both still fall under the category of Turing-Complete, either can do the problems of both, so it's no use asking what people use. The question is what would be more efficient. Given that people DO use MPI and PVM, I'm less than convinced that people have looked into efficiency when scaling up will work.

      --
      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)
  9. quandary! by roc97007 · · Score: 2

    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.
    1. Re:quandary! by jamesh · · Score: 2

      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.

      Hopefully the shareholders realise that every dollar that goes to the various law firms is a dollar that won't be part of the profit pool they get dividends from. Sure, $4 billion is a huge loss or gain for the parties in question but i don't think anyone believes that $4bn is ever actually going to change hands.

      If I was placing a bet on anyone, i'd be putting my money on the lawyers. That would be a sure bet.

  10. Re:Why exactly ? by UnknowingFool · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Itanium servers are very profitable for HP and they don't really have any competition in this server space. It is very expensive for Intel as they don't sell enough of them to justify the R&D and support. Intel would like to drop it but for HP. Oracle would like to drop it for support costs. Probably HP wants to keep their profits even though it costs money for everyone else.

    --
    Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
  11. HP v. Oracle by Guppy06 · · Score: 2

    Any chance that they will both lose?

    A boy can dream...

  12. Try MySQL by drooling-dog · · Score: 3, Funny

    If Oracle doesn't want to support it on your platform, you can do it yourself. For less than $4 billion, anyway...

    1. Re:Try MySQL by laffer1 · · Score: 3, Funny

      To be fair, it would be a cluster of skateboards.

      --
      MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
  13. Re:HP Itanium Support by gstrickler · · Score: 2, Insightful

    And that's HP's problem, not Oracle's. HP didn't pay Oracle to develop, or maintain their software for HP systems. Oracle did it because they thought it was good business. All of the Itanium sales projections over the years have been reduced by at least an order of magnitude. Now, with Itanic continuing to sink, Oracle has changed it's mind.

    $4B is insane, it's nearly the entire Itanium market. And the claim that Oracle would agree to a contract that could cost them $4B as part of the settlement of a lawsuit over hiring a HP's ex-CEO, who resigned amid a scandal of his own making, a CEO who would almost certainly have been fired (and probably was told to retire), is simply absurd. No, HP is simply trying to keep a sinking ship afloat and trying to make Oracle stay and help bail water.

    --
    make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
  14. Re:Why exactly ? by jedidiah · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Are you kidding? Sparc and PPC are plenty of competition for HP in the server space. If anything, HP/UX has always been an ugly redheaded stepchild when it comes to Oracle support.

    If you're running HP, you're already trying to smash a square peg into a round hole here.

    That said: Oracle should still be held to any contracts it made.

    --
    A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
  15. Re:HP Itanium Support by bmo · · Score: 5, Informative

    >HP didn't pay Oracle to develop, or maintain their software for HP systems. Oracle did it because they thought it was good business.

    Larry signed the contract. They're on the hook.

    Just like David Boies signed a contract to prosecute SCO's lawsuits until the heat death of the universe, because he thought he was going to get a chunk of the 5 billion SCO was suing IBM for.

    Greed leads to bad decisions. Who woulda thunk it.

    --
    BMO

  16. EnterpriseDB by Defiler · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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

  17. Re:HP Itanium Support by joelsherrill · · Score: 2

    We don't know what the contract said. We also don't know if HP subsidized the port of Oracle products to their Itanium line in exchange for some commitment.

    $4bn is probably more money than HP thought it was worth but you have to have room to negotiate.

    We can be pretty sure that dropping Oracle support did not help keep people using HP Itanium computers.

    If Oracle violated a signed contract, then they deserve this. Otherwise, it is no more of a waste of court time than anything Apple has done.

  18. Re:four /billion/ ?! by Sir_Sri · · Score: 2

    Depends how they calculate 4 billion dollars. If their entire itanium business reseted on Oracle continuing support and the itanium business was 4 billion dollars then it's not crazy.

    It seems crazy. But this is a lot of expensive stuff we're talking about. The hardware is cheap, it's the software, and importantly the data in the software that matters, and that's big money. Migrating it all to another setup could be expensive, replacing all the hardware is expensive etc.

  19. Re:HP Itanium Support by bmo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Oracle only gets out of the contract for development if the clause on it is unconscionable or otherwise unenforceable.

    Unlike your average joe, Oracle has lawyers that they pay to go over this stuff and pick out and cross out the unenforceable and unconscionable stuff for revision before signing.

    IANAL, but I trust Oracle hires good lawyers.

    --
    BMO

  20. Re:HP Itanium Support by bmo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    >I would say a $4B penalty claim in such a case is unconscionable, and not foreseeable.

    No. That's not how it works. It's not whether the penalty is unconscionable. That's just HP asking for relief. They can ask for any number they want. But in cases like this, you always ask for more than what you need because it only gets adjusted down anyway.

    You only get out of it if *the clause in the contract itself* is unconscionable or otherwise unenforceable. According to HP, Oracle signed a contract saying that Oracle would continue to support Itanium. HP is telling the court that to make them whole for Oracle to break the contract, it would be 4 billion to call it even, because that's what the projected damage would be, according to HP.

    Whether the court agrees with that amount or not, the court has to first determine whether the clause itself was unconscionable or otherwise unenforceable. If it's a valid clause, it's just a matter of determining how much it would be to make HP "whole" for Oracle breaking the contract.

    Proving the clause is unconscionable or otherwise unenforceable is a pretty high hurdle for Oracle to clear, since their lawyers are experienced in handling contracts like this and they should have known before signing that it was unconscionable. Proving this means that their lawyers were incompetent at the time of signing. Not proving it means that their current lawyers are incompetent.

    THE CONTRACT IS INVALID BECAUSE I WAS DRUNK, YOUR HONOUR.

    --
    BMO

  21. Re:Why exactly ? by rubycodez · · Score: 3, Interesting

    HP already ported it to x86 as internal experiment, it can run there

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/08/hp_ux_on_x86_project_kinetic/

  22. Re:Why exactly ? by unixisc · · Score: 2

    While TFA doesn't mention it, the reason HP is pissed is that it's HP/UX that Oracle is refusing to support. Not (just) OpenVMS. The latter is already an EOLed OS, but HP/UX on Integrity servers is still very much alive, at least in HP's opinion.

    However, Oracle is hardly alone in dropping support. SAP has dropped support for the platform, and even among the Linux vendors, Red Hat, Centos and Canonical have all dropped support. Debian is the only Linux still supporting Itanium.