HP Tries to Breathe Life into Itanium by Combining It with Xeon

The entire confrontation between Oracle on one side and HP and Intel on the other has not waned, but HP is determined to keep the Itanium going.

In comes project Odyssey, a new development roadmap that will somehow combine the Itanium platform with Intel Xeon processors.

Oracle already said that everything Itanium does can just as well be accomplished by the Xeon series of chips.

As such, this might as well be interpreted and HP half-agreeing to that.

Then again, this isn't the first and probably won't be the last hybrid technological project ever made.

“Clients have been asking us to expand the mission-critical experience that is delivered today with HP-UX on Integrity to an x86-based infrastructure,” said Martin Fink, senior vice president and general manager of business critical systems at HP.

“HP plans to transform the server landscape for mission-critical computing by using the flexibility of HP BladeSystem and bringing key HP technology innovations from Integrity and HP-UX to the x86 ecosystem. Unlike the competition, HP offers an open, integrated, single platform approach.”

HP intends to advance HP Integrity servers, HP NonStop systems and the HP-UX and OpenVMS operating systems.

Still, the one element that drew attention was the “DragonHawk” enclosures (HP Superdome 2 enclosure) which will let clients run mission-critical workloads on HP-UX on Intel Itanium-based blades at the same time with Microsoft Windows or Red Hat Enterprise Linux workloads.

The quarrel between HP and Oracle dates back months and started when Oracle said it would stop developing new software for the Intel Itanium platform, which, it mentioned, is outdated and artificially kept alive because HP has been paying Intel to do so.

HP basically admitted to that but, then again, the contract it has with Intel isn't actually illegal either. In the end, this is just a conflict of interests with a lot of customers caught in the middle.