Common sense tells you that getting off your mainframe is a smart move.  Over the years we have found that there are many IBM Mainframe customers that are 'stuck' in their current system, especially if they are running a smaller mainframe rated at under 100MIPS.  This seems to be most prevalent in enterprises or government agencies where dependence on continuous system operations has kept them from changing.

We recently have heard that Oracle has chosen to stop future development for all their software on the HP Itanium platform. Let’s put aside that Oracle has unilaterally made this decision for their customers, and shelve the fact that this decision was an attempt to gain more control over a company’s IT budget. Let’s instead look at the rationale and logic that was used for this decision:

• “After multiple conversations with Intel senior management.”
  Yet, Intel immediately distanced itself from Oracle with Paul Otellini, Intel CEO, issuing a statement to the contrary, where Intel Reaffirms Commitment to Itanium.
• “Help customers protect their investments”
  Whose investments is Oracle trying to protect? Oracle has a history of dropping off platforms to simplify and lower the costs of its own development. It is unclear how limiting choice of platforms, particularly mission-critical platforms such as HP Integrity Superdome systems, helps to protect customer’s investment.
• “Oracle continually evaluates customer demand for its software on server platforms.”
  Now this is the one the really makes me laugh. All you need to do is look at the IDC data mentioned in this blog post by an HP colleague, “Whose clunker do you want cash for?”,  to see that if Oracle followed its own logic it should have stopped software development on Sun SPARC systems…but it didn’t. Hmmm – I wonder why?  

Borrowing the words of the 23rd century Vulcan philosopher, Mr. Spock: “Most illogical.”

What doesn’t defy logic is the reason that companies have continued to select HP Integrity servers as their choice for mission-critical workloads.  Click here to find out why.

Guest blog by  Martin Whittaker, VP of Engineering

HP servers offer outstanding performance running Oracle software in every environment, from industry standard to mission critical, from scale-out to scale-up, from ProLiant to Integrity. But customers can’t make critical comparisons on price and performance because Oracle won’t let them. They refuse to publish benchmark results with HP servers, even though they have audited benchmark results that are ready for publication.

Guest blog by Katie Curtin-Mestre, Director, HP BCS Software Planning and Marketing

HP has announced that it will continue support of and is committed to develop innovative enhancements to HP-UX for more than 10 years.

HP again raised the bar with our ProLiant scale-up x86 offerings.  They now support the Intel Xeon Processor E7-2800 and E7-4800 (aka "Westmere EX"), and offer increased resiliency, scalability and efficiency to an already superb, award winning product line.  If you've got, or are investigating new servers that can handle large scale x86 data intensive workloads and big databases, these products need to be on your checklist. Here's the skinny on what's new....

Guest blog by Doug Oathout,   VP of Converged Infrastructure Strategy

In this time of uncertainty, HP has your best interests at heart. Immediately following the Oracle announcement, HP publically stated that they would continue the development and innovation of the Itanium-based Integrity server with its HP-UX and OpenVMS operating systems using a roadmap extending out beyond the next 10 years. Plus, HP will continue to support customers running existing versions of Oracle software on Itanium-based Integrity servers, both existing and future platforms, during the same timeframe. The result: no upheaval in your current or future plans. This is what we all hope for and need!

Regardless of the relationship, from casual to complex, there always seems to be a ton of questions. While some of us are more analytical than others we’d like to think we logically assess all options in hopes of reaching the right answer—especially when confronted with more complex relationships.  While a myriad of answers to the questions about relations exist, it usually comes down to a simple matter of trust.

The philosophy at HP is design excellence for all of our platforms.  Furthermore, sharing innovation across platforms where it makes sense for the customer problem and solution we are offering is encouraged and commended.  That's also the power of our converged infrastructure strategy -- and something that will truly help customers meet the tough challenges facing the data center of the future.  Our Business Critical Systems Chief Technologist breaks down the success characteristics of mission-critical converged infrastructure in this series...