The Itanium spat took a further nasty turn this week, as HP hit Oracle with a lawsuit intended to force the database giant not to drop Itanium support. Oracle originally announced that they’d stop supporting Intel’s Itanium chip back in March, provoking howls of protest from Intel and HP (the biggest supplier of Itanium-powered hardware.) Both companies stressed an ongoing roadmap for Itanium, but Oracle didn’t back down. IBM joined in last month, describing the chip line as a “dead end.” And yesterday, HP filed a long complaint in a Santa Clara court. As Art Wittmann notes for InformationWeek, “Customers can only watch in disgust.” Timothy Prickett-Morgan at The Register reports Oracle’s rapid response; the company would appear to be standing by its earlier claims. Arik Hesseldahl at All Things D has the lawsuit itself, and some further analysis. Art Wittmann compares the whole thing to an episode of Desperate Housewives. It seems rather more akin to a bad day in the sandpit at a Kindergarten, but customers are potentially getting hurt by all the thrown sand and someone needs to grow up and step back soon so everyone can get back to business.