Oracle Supports Intel Itanium For Now

Oracle confirmed that it will continue to support Hewlett-Packard Itanium servers, following a ruling on August 1.

While the company announced back then that it will appeal the ruling, which requires Oracle to resume support and pay damages determined by a jury, Oracle told reporters that Itanium is back on the supported hardware list. This also means that the company's software will be released at the same time as IBM's Power-based mainframe systems.

HP and Oracle are still entangled in a bitter battle, in which HP has an interest in Itanium due to significant customer deployments, while Oracle argues that there is no contract that would require the company to support Itanium and that Itanium is on its last leg anyway. Intel has not given any statement, but the Itanium 9500 series, code-named Poulson, is still expected to debut as Intel's new flagship processor this year.

Oracle declined to say whether the company still plans to appeal the ruling. At least for now, Oracle customers running Itanium systems have some time to re-evaluate their situation, as it seems clear that Oracle will try to find a way out of supporting Itanium as soon as it can.

Wolfgang Gruener is a contributor to Tom's IT Pro. He is currently principal analyst at Ndicio Research, a market analysis firm that focuses on cloud computing and disruptive technologies, and maintains the conceivablytech.com blog. An 18-year veteran in IT journalism and market research, he previously published TG Daily and was managing editor of Tom's Hardware news, which he grew from a link collection in the early 2000s into one of the most comprehensive and trusted technology news sources.

See here for all of Wolfgang's Tom's IT Pro articles.