Yes, this is a commonly used combination. I would advise updating your ifort to one which came out in the last 3 weeks, even if you don't see the problems which have shown up on Red Hat installations of 2.6 kernels.
I expect the 9.1 update compiler about 2 weeks from now to be a significant improvement over previous ifort versions for Itanium. You can install both 8.1 and 9.1 on the same license, if you have a concern about keeping 8.1 available.
