Oracle and HP

As the IT has been developed in a high speed, people like to compare them. There's a new skirmish between the old and new schools of IT architecture. The old school calls for matching the system used to the workload at hand -- we've been doing that for decades. The new school -- the cloud school -- argues for massive replication of commodity hardware, which can be sliced up, shaped, and reshaped to handle any workload thrown at it.

Both HP and Intel, meanwhile, deny any intent to dump Itanium, and if you consider the size and complexion of that business -- particularly on HP's part, Dell latitude D510 laptop battery -- Itanium will have a long horizon. But we didn't need the yelping from Oracle to see that workload-specific systems are alive and well. IBM's entire product line is a nod to that thinking. Big Blue continues to develop the z (mainframe), p (proprietary Unix) and x (x86-64) series of servers, and -- at least until Oracle declares otherwise -- there's no evidence IBM is giving up on any of them.

For its part, HP knows a thing or two about what it takes to sunset processor architecture. It has killed more chip lines than most any other company has started. Some of the most notable ones include Alpha, which it got when it acquired Compaq (and HP G62 replacement battery got from Digital Equipment) and its own PA-RISC family. The upshot is that killing processor lines is an expensive and unpleasant prospect, and it seems unlikely that HP would do so with Itanium considering it has no alternative for its own proprietary Unix, HP-UX, a still lucrative though shrinking segment of the high-end server market.

IT transitions of any large scope -- whether they're away from IT architecture, like workload-specific computing, or away from a processor family, like Itanium -- take a decade or more. So vendors that have the interests of their customers at heart let the transition happen like transiton HP Pavilion DM4 laptop battery at its natural pace. Sun hardware running Oracle software is all about workload-specific design, and while that's a high-margin market now, it's one that will slowly but surely give way to cloud computing.