While everyone has had a reasonably good time bashing the Itanium for the past several years, Itanium does have some significant upper-echelon features that x86/x64 systems could only dream about. Many of those features are in the RAS (Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability) arena — capabilities like failed DIMM isolation, hot-swappable RAM, inter-socket memory mirroring, corrupt data containment, and CPU hot-adds. Until the release of the Nehalem-EX, these features simply didn’t exist in the Xeon world. They do now.
