Just out of curiosity: what selling-points will there be left for Itanium servers? From personal experience I know that the ports of FLOS software are mostly very out of date (sometimes from years past), operating system support is pretty much down to HP-UX, and with the departure of one of the largest databases using it as a backend server seems risky to me.
We don't use Itanium here, but Oracle scares me. I have expected them to drop all support for non-Sun hardware ever since they bought Sun. If you're running Oracle on non-Sun hardware you are in trouble.
Here's what happened.
Mark Hurd left HP under a cloud over some sexual harassment with actress Jodie Fisher. They could have cover it up this small internal matter but I think it was internal politics that forced him out and into the arms of oracle but it was a humiliating exit.
So now the announcement to stop support for itanium I see this as payback to hurt HP also they want use this to bring up sun's market share again.
This will put preassure on HP's customers. If you have HP itanium server running cluster with oracle there is a clock ticking and you will be under preassure to do something about it. HP has come out to say they will continue to support oracle on itanium though no further details have been mentioned.
In the long run ... IBM has DB2, Oracle has sun .. HP has ??? my guess is they could try to buy SAP since L�o Apotheker was ex-CEO of SAP who is also now the CEO of HP.
SAP was recently asked to pay oracle 1.3 billion in copyright fines. So both HP and SAP hate oracle guts and with L�o Apotheker as the common denominator what do you think is going to happen?
Lets imagine here say HP buys sap and sap develops a database and offers a migration option for customers to move away from oracle or SAP endorses DB2 with HP and IBM alliance oracle may call a truce and sack Hurd again for being more trouble than he is worth.