I-tanium, U-tanium, we all scream at Itanium!

Alan Choyna, Tuesday, May 23, 2006 @ 2:30 pm

In our infrastructure practice we've seen an uptick in the number of people implementing Oracle RAC on Linux. It's a good solution and takes some of the headache out of capacity planning, but there are certain hardware pitfalls of which you need to be aware. First among these is the choice of the Intel Itanium platform.

One issue with the Itanium is that the driver support for RAID cards and SAN's is well behind those of other platforms. Consider RHEL4 with Oracle. As of this writing, you cannot find an officially certified RAID card for the Itanium. You're stuck with software RAID or unsupported hardware.

Or consider Hitachi multipathing software for HP OEM'd SANs. First off, Hitachi hasn't built their HDLM software to run on a 64 bit Itanium (the AMD Opterons and Intel Xeon 64bit x86 architectures are supported, of course), and you can’t run Oracle on 32 bit RHAS as that
isn’t certified (don’t even mention the performance hit). So your choices for a decent SAN solution have just been slashed.

On paper, Itanium has great potential, but the much cheaper and better (full current X86 64 bit support!) AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon 64 bit solutions have come into the market and crushed it. Performance benchmarks show that an Opteron solution can run circles around Itanium at a fraction (30 - 40%) of the cost.
As a result, Itanium has never really gained traction, has very low market share, and is falling further behind. Software and hardware support for it lags way behind support for the AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon systems.

I predict that this trend of worsening support will continue, and the future upgradeability and supportability of the system will go from poor to highly suspect.

This scratches just the surface of the issues we've seen with Itanium and they stretch far beyond just implementations of Oracle RAC. The pain is real. If you're considering Itanium, think again.

Related posts:

1. hardware driver support confusion
2. IBM to acquire ILOG and other rumors
3. The Problem of Encoding H.264 In a Flash Client
4. Oracle and Sun: What it may mean for Open Source Landscape
5. IBM and ILOG playing nice

Comments (2)

Technologies and Platforms

Comments: 2 so far

• Leave a comment
• Comment feed for this post
• TrackBack URL

1. 

   Intel Xeon

   DDR2 400 (ECC support)Harness the power of Intels Xeon processor in high performance systems from Aspen Systems.I…

   Comment by Intel Xeon, Friday, June 2, 2006 @ 4:00 am

2. 

   Three years later….. Oh what fun to run across one of these predictions and see just how wrong it was. Guess HP didn’t listen to you.

   And anyone who has real databasing to do would be a fool to try to do it on Oracle RAC running under Linux.

   Comment by Reality, Wednesday, January 28, 2009 @ 11:54 am

Leave a comment