What leaves itanic afloat

It is software, indeed, as stated in this article. Mostly low-level OS layers, like LVM, not even application, since still today, a lot of them haven't found the time/expertise to recompile under itanic ! HP-UX + LVM always do the job in a SAN environment and costs nothing as compared to vxVM, its heretic descendant (heretic, because, being exactly the same, it decided to change all of its cmds to absolutely insane names/concepts).

Only HP-UX and its integration to storage env keep itanic afloat. In a world where Linux (with a single distribution) would have ruled, Itanic would have sunk long ago.