Report: Who wants Itanium servers?

Intel chiefs were in the UK in February to promote the 64bit Itanium chip to corporates. While some analysts are still focused on arguments about using Itanium servers for common business workloads, it seems Intel now accepts this is not the most likely market for servers built with the chip.

Boyd Davis, general manager of Intel's server marketing group, said the Itanium is targeted at a different market to Intel's Xeon server line, and competes against Risc chips. He added that sales growth for the Xeon is almost flat, and noted that half of the server market is accounted for by sales of Risc kit.

The leading Risc systems are Sun's high-end Solaris-based servers, IBM's Power5+ based AIX Unix and System i5 offerings, plus HP's PA-Risc, NonStop and Open VMS systems. Of these, the path from PA-Risc/HP-UX to Itanium is obvious – customers can migrate to Itanium often without needing to recompile software. In contrast, migrating from PA-Risc to Sun or IBM would require a complete software overhaul and possibly a revamp of the storage infrastructure too.

Davis said analyst IDC predicts the Itanium will have one third of the Risc market by 2010. This view is no doubt linked to the predictable PA-Risc upgrade market.

Speaking at the same event in London, Bruce Lynn, head of Microsoft's server business group, said the Itanium is a good option for some Windows workloads, such as high-end SQL Server databases, line-of-business and other custom applic- ations, but it is not a good platform for others, such as SharePoint, file-and-print servers, fax servers and Windows Media Services.

But Intel's biggest hurdle is not to get industry speakers to agree on the positioning of the Itanium as a Risc replacement chip. Rather it is to actually sell Itanium servers to businesses and then get those buyers to talk about it in public.

While we cannot be sure of the exact number of Itanium-based systems sold to businesses, it is fair to say that Intel has not yet produced a single customer from a major firm. At the recent briefing, the closest thing to a real customer was Smart Human Logistics, a UK firm that produces a payroll application.

Nick Whitely, Smart Human Logistics chief technology officer, said his firm had recently ported its product to Windows on the Itanium platform. However, he said the project was largely funded by Intel and its partners – the estimated cost to his firm was £10,000, but he suggested the project cost the Intel camp significantly more.

At £10,000, the project was a good move, but if the firm had had to bear the full costs it would not have done it for the foreseeable future, Whitely added.

Migration to Itanium was very simple because Smart's application is based on the Windows .Net Framework, so it did not need to be recompiled or altered. Projects using languages such as C or C++ would almost certainly need much more effort to convert. So far, none of Smart's customers have bought the Itanium version of the product.

Virtualisation tools are another problem for Itanium. Vendors such as Microsoft say Itanium is not suitable for mainstream business roles, so perhaps it is unsurprising that there are no Windows-based virtualisation tools for the platform. However, many firms are turning to virtualisation to speed up software rollouts, and improve disaster recovery and server utilisation, so the absence of this feature for Itanium will increasingly make the platform look like an IT backwater.