We are looking at a new environment to run our Oracle Database running on SUSE (potentially migrating to RedHat). Our database is approximately 100GB and performs adequately on our current hardware (x86_64) with approximately 6GB of ram allocated to it. We are growing quickly however and will require more performance shortly.

Given the cost of Oracle licenses we would like to maximize the value from each license by choosing the most appropriate CPU to run the software on.

The questions are:

Are there substantial benefits to looking at Itanium or Sparc hardware, are there any drawbacks? Is there a point where one starts to scale out better?

What are the long term support options for Itanium? Given the dominance of x86 would it be safer long term to stick with x86?

On average what would be the performance benefit of implementing an Oracle database on Itanium or Sparc over x86_64? Is this an issue at all or will other factors (IO/RAM) cap out first?

If anyone can point me towards some solid documentation on comparisons between the platforms that provides good case analysis of when to choose which I'm more than happy to accept that as an answer.

Edit:- Added Sparc as an Option as it was previously not considered however with the recent Oracle Sun aquisition seems very relevant.