Re: Re: All a bit sad, innit?
".....HP involvement on Linux on Itanium is kind of non existent today....." Unfortunately for Red Hat (and for Micro$haft), us customers had a preference for hp-ux on Integrity, especially on the enterprise servers like the Superdome. I'm told it was something like 90% of the Integrity servers went out of the factory with hp-ux rather than another OS, and that's pretty insane considering you could buy the servers OS-free and download and roll your own Linux if you wanted. From a commercial viewpoint, I think it was a case of "we're paying extra to get the best hardware, we might as well pay extra to get the best OS with the best support that goes with that hardware." I guess the same went for the developers, they just saw better dev support from hp and Intel rather than RH.
As I've posted many times before, it wasn't a case of we COULDN'T do it on RHEL, it was a case of it being EASIER to go with hp-ux seeing as we had the option of buying tested stacks (like Amdocs with Oracle and Websphere on Serviceguard on 11i), with proven 24x7 support. We COULD do the same on RHEL (we kludged it toegther and tested it), and hp were happy to support the effort (I had two guys in hp Germany and a guy in hp Labs in the States to call on to get it working, plus a number of insultants from the local hp reseller), but we just felt more comfortable with hp-ux.
As for Windows, the only area I saw that shone in on Itanium was large M$ SQL server implementations, and once hp started building large x64 servers like the DL785, RHEL and M$ saw the dominance of hp-ux in the Itanium market and decided to concentrate on the x64. For me, it was always a shame M$ never developed a fork of Exchange for Itanium, capable of really large mailbox numbers and ready to go head-to-head with Notes/Domino on p-Series, but I guess they saw that IBM were happilly trashing that threat to Exchange all by themselves.
"....But they would have to build it up from the ground...." If hp ever wanted to get antagonistic with RH, they could just do an Oracle, clone the latest CentOS release, and add a few lines of comments, and - bingo! - hp-Lux. They could go a bit further and add some code to make it work better with other hp tools like Serviceguard (used to be supported with Linux and IMO was better than the standard RHEL or SuSE clustering). Thing is, hp are already the leading Linux server vendor, their tools like SIM and IC already integrate fine with RHEL (and VMware, and Windows), so they don't NEED to do an Oracle and clone a Linux.