The pain of Itanium: Is it the way to cloud computing or is it a dead-end?

Many will not agree that HP and Intel are predicting the future of an Android chip at the Intel Summit earlier this year. Since HP gave up its PA-RISC chip a few years ago, the integrity server that uses an itanium® chip gives the user a non-stop system migration. The original HP9000 series server users had to spend a lot of money migrating the system to an Itanium architecture, and today, those users who use Oracle databases may have to consider migrating the original system to an HP friend's Aix or SPARC platform.

If the Itanium chip is still able to maintain a technical lead, that is, performance and reliability advantages, it may still be able to maintain a large number of users. But the problem is whether IBM's Power7, or Fujitsu and Oracle/sun, are combined with SPARC chips. Itanium chips do not seem to prevail in these areas. Another way out of integrity may be its support for multiple operating systems, although at the beginning of its release, more than 98% of users across the market only run HP-UX on integrity, but as cloud computing http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/ Aggregation/9214.html "> Open Systems in recent years, more and more users began to run Linux and Windows on integrity, or multiple operating system mixed mode." (High-end integrity systems, such as the RX8600 series, support physical-level hardware partitions, ideal for system integration in enterprise applications) but in this area Itanium is also under pressure from the same family, and the latest Xeon 5600 series is comparable in performance and stability to Itanium. In an open application environment, Itanium has obviously no obvious advantage over Xeon. And in the market, vendors such as Fujitsu have migrated from Itanium to Xeon in their key business open servers.

Virtualization and cloud computing may be a technology that can be introduced to users who consider protecting their existing investment in Tengzhong. In particular, virtualization is more practical in a mixed environment with a large number of x86 servers and an itanium® server. Relatively low-end itanium® servers can be considered for consolidating a large number of existing small x86 servers, such as portals, Web or OA, which are undoubtedly attractive in reducing overall operating costs. Moreover, Itanium has a great advantage in the reliability of the whole system, and many times it can reduce the failure rate of the whole system.

and the corresponding database, such as the Oracle database server mentioned above, may be the most tangled user. This type of critical application is clearly not appropriate for the virtualization layer. If the user already has a large number of Oracle databases based on integrity, it may only continue to maintain the original system. Technology is evolving, and perhaps with the sophistication of more advanced cloud technologies such as SaaS, it is no longer difficult to get a highly reliable, high-performance database platform that protects users ' investments over time.

(Responsible editor: Liu Fen)