We've been playing with Red Hat's Advanced Workstation 2.1 (the OS they keep talking about but no-one can find, anywhere...) on Itanium2 for a couple weeks. HP says you need to purchase a SCSI disk and controller to make Linux run on the Itanium2, but we've found it runs "okay" on the default IDE disk, as well as on the SCSI. The reliability of the IDE might be in question, but I haven't been up long enough to comment on this.
The larger issue is reliability and the age of the distribution. It looks like the OS is based on 7.1 or 7.2, but certainly no 8.0. This makes it a little hard to sell to users as a workstation, especially when RH 8.0 looks so nice. :-) We've also run into some fun little reliability issues. I found that as root, doing a 'cat /proc/kcore > /dev/null', although pretty useless and abnormal, is enough to crash, not lock, but crash, the box. I get lots of beeps and then a reboot. Fun!
Oh the Itanium2's behalf, from what I've heard from other admins, I guess it's pretty snappy as a compute server in certain situations.
So, my overall opinion is the Itanium2 and Linux is ready for the compute server environment, but probably not quite read for the desktop/workstation setting.
Just an opinion. Nothing more.
