Itanium Groups Make Moves

By Doug Barney

I’m not sure why a company that pulls in more than $30 billion ayear needs an alliance to help promote one of its key product lines, but I’mjust a lowly journalist — I talk to and write about the rich while wonderingwhere my next motorcycle payment is going to come from!

But Intel has theItanium Solutions Alliance, a group ofvendors that rely in some measure on the future of this 64-bit processor line. Abig part of the effort is the development of applications that specificallyexploit the Itanium 2 architecture.

In the latest news, the Itanium 2 isnow supported by RedHat Enterprise Linux version 5.1, along with the associatedXen hypervisor.

Andthe alliance is growing. It now has some 200 members, and a library of 12,000applications.

The Itanium consortium is locked in a heated battle withPower6 processor proponents who have their own group, Power.org. The biggest Power6 vendor is IBM with its System p line ofservers, which like Itanium with Red Hat, has gobs of virtualization built rightin. IBM claims there are 15,000 applications that run on the Powerplatform.