Oracle Corp. has agreed to keep supporting its database and other software for Hewlett-Packard’s Itanium platform following a bitterly-fought breach of contract trial in California.
As this story from ComputerWorld U.S. details, the fight began in 2011 when Oracle said it would stop support for the Itanium platform, the name for CPUs made by Intel Corp.
Intel began making the 64-bit processors in 2001 for high-end RISC-based systems running versions of Unix as well as in an emulation mode for Windows Server. It had hoped to eat into the market for RISC-based processors made by IBM and others. But as Intel’s x86-based processors increased in power and reliability, organizations began moving from Unix to Windows Server.
(HP Integrity NonStop servers like this use Itanium processors)
HP is one of the few server makers to still offer Itanium systems.
In 2009 Red Hat Linux withdrew support for the platform, followed by Microsoft in 2010. A year later Oracle announced the same. But HP wouldn’t stand for that, arguing it had a contract.
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