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."

Comments

SOS

[plover]

The Itanic is sinking!

The ghost of Ken Olsen called,

[soupforare]

he extends sympathies.

Re:damages per processor

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Existing Customers

[raehl]

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.

Re:Existing Customers

[Bert64]

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.

Re:Why exactly ?

[Sique]

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.

damages per processor ... WHY?

[DragonWriter]

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.

Itanium 3 is a decent CPU

[jd]

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.

Re:Itanium 3 is a decent CPU

[multiplexo]

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?

Re:Why exactly ?

[jedidiah]

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.

Re:HP Itanium Support

[bmo]

>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