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Dec. 21, 2009

Red Hat says it won't be supporting its future Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 on any Itanium platform, without offering much explanation or justification. On various Linux support forums all over the Internet, there are Bugzilla reports that actually closed with a message saying that Red Hat were no longer supporting IA-64 - also known as Itanium and various other names.

For its part, Intel has been rather quiet on the subject, as has Itanium's biggest cheerleader so far: HP.

But officially, Red Hat came back and offered to volunteer this: "Red Hat is committed to protecting Itanium customers' investments and in providing these customers with enterprise class support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 through March 2014. During this period, Red Hat will provide support, deliver new features, and enable new Itanium hardware in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 exclusively in accordance with the published RHEL product lifecycle."

And it continues with this: "in addition, extended support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 for Itanium is available up to March 2017 from selected OEMs. The next major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (v6) will not provide support for the Itanium architecture. Consequently, all Itanium related developments will be incorporated into Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 exclusively."

Unless Novell plans to continue to support Itanium servers with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12, of which, by the way, Novell has said very little. For all we know, SLES 12 wasn't going to support Itanium chips either.

Perhaps Red Hat pulling the plug on Itanium with RHEL 6 will give Novell a niche it can support, much as it already does on IBM's System Z mainframes.

Novell claims to have sold over 85 per cent of the Linux licenses on Big Blue's big iron platform.

But there are some in the Linux community that seem to think that 85 percent is an inflated number. Strike another blow at Intel's Itanium CPU, which was supposed to support Solaris and IBM's AIX OS but doesn't and which has been relegated to a database server on Windows only servers.

If you like Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 5.x, which is a perfectly fine operating system, and if you have Itanium servers sitting around and would like them in production running Linux, you are going to be liking it for a long time. Just don't even think of RHEL 6 though, since it will never happen...

Will Red Hat ever change its mind about this, eventually? Don't hold your breath!

But RHEL 6 will be supported on IBM's Power-based servers and its mainframes, which have been supported with RHEL 4 and 5, as well as x64 servers.

It's difficult and still too early to say how much or how little support money comes to Red Hat through Power and mainframe platforms, but if Novell has the share it claims to on the mainframe, it would not have been at all surprising to see Red Hat drop IBM mainframes with RHEL 6 as well. But that's another question altogether.

Overall, Red Hat, IBM and Novell have never given any kind of shipment or revenue numbers for Linux on Power, and certainly nobody expects that to change anytime soon, but it's still just as difficult to estimate how much money is at stake here.

However, the plan is to support IBM's Power Systems with RHEL 6, or at least this is what it seems for now. Will that change in the future? Some (or many in the Linux community) don't think so...

Being the big Linux supporter that Big Blue always has been and continues to be, what the company needs to do is to acquire Novell, continue to monetize NetWare for every penny it still has left, embrace SLES as its preferred Linux on all of its platforms including its mainframes, and then try to compete headon with Red Hat.

To be sure, acquiring Citrix as well would offer IBM an x64 hypervisor (Xen) and application streaming platform as well, which would better compete with Red Hat and VMware in the enterprise segment as well as on cloud computing.

The next few quarters will prove interesting, both for Red Hat as well as IBM. It will be refreshing to see how well the Linux community looks and interprets these various developments coming from two of the biggest commercial contributors of Linux.

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Source: The Linux Tech Support Forum.

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