Can HP's 'Super' server save Itanium?

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volume," Ryder said. "This is the platform they bet the company on. For all the years we heard HP and Intel hyping this thing, what we have achieved today is kind of what we expected to see in 1999."

And there's serious competition. IBM's Power5-based p5-595 trounced Itanium in a recent server speed test. And while much of Sun Microsystems' current attention is aimed at its lower-end machines, a partnership with Fujitsu and the high-end Rock processors could boost its fortunes.

HP points to some successes, though. There are 500 customers using Itanium systems to run their business software from SAP--a demanding and essential computing task--and 40 of the world's 100 largest companies are customers, said Mark Hudson, vice president of marketing for HP's Enterprise Storage and Servers group.

Not alone
Also in HP's favor: It isn't alone in the Itanium market. Fujitsu plans to announce its 64-processor Itanium server Tuesday in San Francisco, sources familiar with the plan said. The more Itanium server sellers there are--IBM's coolness notwithstanding--the easier it is to persuade customers and software companies that the products are mainstream.

Intel once envisioned Itanium as suitable for the entire server market but now has retreated to the high end. That's not a great place to be, judging by the failures of Compaq Computer's Alpha processor and the fading fortunes of Silicon Graphics' MIPS, said Gabriel Consulting analyst Dan Olds.

"A processor cannot survive as only a high-end alternative. There simply isn't enough volume to support development and production," Olds said. "Itanium will become merely a replacement for HP's PA-RISC chip--albeit with less software and industry support."

Another complication is the overlap between Intel's Itanium family and its lower-end Xeon family. Xeon can run widely used software written for x86 processors such as Pentium and is gradually becoming more powerful.

With a new generation of Xeon processors this week, though, HP

HP Itanium and Superdome Road map

This article does not speak to the bandwidth or BUS
Architecture speeds between chips and memory, Nor, and of
even more relevance, the underlying support for an OS which in
design should be tightly coupled with the machine code
instruction set to add any business value. Is HP going to
support HP/UX, and r LPAR's with all of this horse power under
the hood? Or, will HP continue to waffle between Microsoft,
Linux and HP/UX with no clear direction other than INTEL speeds
and feeds and impressive processor names? So what good are
64 of these bad boys running in a single box if I can not
provision all of this into a consolidated "adaptive" system for an
Enterprise?

On the ground here in the Silicon Valley, we see Opteron as the
chip of choice in the egineering community (Linux) as a whole.
This portends that AMD has the right stuff for the next wave of
killer business apps. It seems to me that when you are talkng
speeds and feeds, you have to include the versatility of the
underlying OS/architecture to have a meaningful discussion. So,
in short, what is the actual point of this Itanium architecture? Is
it relevant? Probably not.

HP Itanium and Superdome Road map

Later this year HP will disclose specific bus b/w and speeds on the enhanced new chipset codenamed Arches which will go into our highend Superdome server and our midrange servers, as well. We will continue the OS support we have had to date of HP-UX, Linux and Windows, plus extend support to these midrange and highend systems for OpenVMS (which is already running on our entry class 1-4p Itanium based Integrity servers). Supporting multiple operating systems is not waffling, but an embrace of reality where virtually every data center on the planet runs a heterogeneous mix of operating systems.

Hardware based partitions (BTW, not available from IBM) are already supported (thus we have been Adaptive Enterprise capabilities for quite some time) and software based partitions will be soon supported on the Integrity servers.

I'm also based in Silicon Valley and see what goes on in running businesses here. HP warmly supports Opteron in our ProLiant servers (we ship more than anyone, including Sun and IBM) as well as Itanium in our Integrity servers. Each has different application sweet spots. ProLiant servers are tops in price/performance in 1-4p configs and used most frequently in edge of network computing, email/groupware infrastructure, EDA, and smaller line of business applications/databases. Integrity servers are best in raw performance for the most demanding line of business applications such as ERP, floating point HPC, highly scalable datawarehouses and databases. Between ProLiant and Integrity servers HP can cover any workload that customers have. They are a nice complement to each other.

[fred dunn]

HEY HP....ITANIC IS OVER, MOVE ON!

When are you going to stop wasting your resources? If you are waiting for Intel to tell you that it's just not working out, don't. Take a lesson from Intels past, they continue to push products even when they are not wanted or needed. Why? Becasuse they have not listened to their consumers and have research expenditures that need to be recovered. And who is going wind up paying for those expenditures, HP. Go ahead and stock your inventory with Itanic processors, at some point you can sell them on eBay as novelty items.

Fred Dunn