[Xen-devel] Re: [rhelv5-list] Itanium support ...

[Zoran Popović <shoom013@xxxxxxxxx>]

2010/2/16 Tom Sightler <ttsig@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>

...

Still, comparisons based solely on "revenue" does fairly represent
market share from Redhat's perspective.  Even if revenue was somehow
equal, $300 million would be what, probably a few thousand EPIC servers,
but that same amount would equate to 10's of thousands of x86 servers

or 10's of thousands of blade systems (even bl870s which are high-end in that range at the moment only for shortly, while smaller HP Integrity blades cost not much more than Xeon-based Proliants - I don't know if people around this are aware of that, and that new Itaniums will use same motherboard chipsets as new Xeons) ...
... or a couple of unknown IBM mainframes, whatever.
 

because they cost so much less per unit.  Redhat has to make enough
profit of the sheer number of machines, not how much money those
machines costs.  It's quite likely that Redhat would be willing to keep
Itanium support around as long as customers were willing to pay 10x more
than x86 customers for support, but my guess is they are not, so Redhat
looks at it and says it's a market where they can't make money.  Markets
that don't make money are not good markets.

sorry, I didn't know that leaders still follow mainly and only that old fashioned rule to make as much as possible with the shortest time-to-value ... I also thought that we got past beyond tribal wars. Even if it's so, it all gives me the chills, the fact I've learned so far that M$ boosted AMD fire, that Oracle through glove into IBM's face with million dollar prize about database machine, that HP is indifferent toward open source and that Red Hat decided to abandon Xen as one of the moving spirits of the open source - why ? Other mature virtualization platforms don't have open source base, and business doesn't like often changes and bleeding edge ... I remember the ramblings on fedora forums, but I still think it all happened to fast ...
 

You might wonder why they still support IBM Power and System/z which
likely also have similar market share and that would be a valid
question, but my guess would be that IBM provides some financial
incentive to do so.

Incentives, incentives ... I have to use that word more often ... I know that even Linus Torvalds mentioned price and real life put as the knife in Itanium's (Intel's ?) back, but is it really all just about market shares and price ? Did really all good things come from that ? Maybe it wouldn't be 10x more, but yes - customer would be willing to pay more for Red Hats support, that is the point I was selling in my company, too (it really is a good service, sincerely, and you probably wouldn't even dream what are they all willing to pay for instead) - in time it could be corrected if that was all the problem, the support subscription price. I am truly sad if it is so, silly HP lost healthy competition, fat cats got fatter, some people lost good business and open source lost possible incentives ... if I ever become a manager ...
 

Later,
Tom

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