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HPE promises users Itanium server refresh next year. In Dutch!

Unix? It's got YEARS left in it

HPE has told a news outlet in The Netherlands that it's pressing ahead with an Itanium refresh for 2017.

The last devotee of the architecture it built with Intel in the late 1990s – which among other things was behind its long lawsuit with Oracle – told Computable last week that the refresh based on the Itanium Kittson chip will land mid-2017 (here in Dutch).

The 64-bit HP-UX and OpenVMS – remember those? – servers are part of a strategy to support the architecture though to 2025, according to HPE server CEO for EMEA Ken Surplice.

That could also leave HPE the last vendor to keep an honest-to-goodness Unix alive all the way to half-way through the next decade. OpenVMS had its latest release in March.

Oracle, as we all know, fought a lawsuit rather than lay out its own coin on Itanium, and the market's about to get even lonelier, according to this retirement schedule from IBM.

From October 31 2016, IBM will stop reselling a long list of Dell kit, including the latter's Itanium-based PowerEdge 3250, 7150 and 7250 servers. The three were Dell's Itanium efforts, and did not succeed.

El Reg notes that Surplice recently Tweeted, from a company boot camp, that the company will be running containers on x86 Linux soon:

That's reinforced by what he told Computable: HP-UX running on HPE Helion will include the ability to provision on bare metal, he said; while containerising HP-UX will let users keep alive apps they can't rewrite, running them in Linux-hosted containers.

A preview of the container technology is due by the end of 2016. ®

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