Red Hat will drop Itanium support in Enterprise Linux 6

From InfoWorld: Red Hat is dropping support for Intel's Itanium processor in Enterprise Linux 6, the next major release of its operating system, the company said in a statement on Sunday.

Dropping support for Itanium makes economic sense for Red Hat, according to Chris Ingle, research director for IDC's European Systems Group. The number of Itanium-based servers sold is likely not high enough for Red Hat to justify spending its resources on supporting a version of Enterprise Linux for this processor. Instead it will focus on support for x86-based servers, Ingle said.

Today, Red Hat also offers support for version 5 on systems based on IBM Power, System z, and S/390 processor architectures.

For users, Red Hat's plan to drop support for Itanium won't result in much of a difference, because most of them already get support from OEMs (original equipment manufacturers), according to Ingle.

Red Hat will still offer support for Enterprise Linux version 5 on Itanium-based servers until March 2014, and it will add new features to version 5 on Itanium and support new hardware in accordance with its standard product lifecycle policy, the company said.

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