Elmer - An EXCELLENT article on Compaq's decision to switch all their high end servers to Intel's ITanium - ESPECIALLY their Himalaya series.
Compaq wins support for processor shift
By Ken Popovich, eWEEK
August 1, 2001 9:36 AM PT
URL: zdnet.com
When Compaq Computer Corp. announced in June that it was redrawing the road map for its NonStop Himalaya servers, executives who oversee the NASDAQ's trading system took notice. After all, they relied on those servers to handle more than $20 trillion worth of stock trades last year.
In fact, Himalaya servers, which can cost millions of dollars each, scale up to 4,080 processors and are valued for their reliability, power some of the world's largest businesses, including 14 of the 15 largest stock exchanges, 80 percent of ATM transactions and nearly 70 percent of all credit card transactions.
So when Compaq announced it would not be migrating the current MIPS-based Himalayas to its veteran Alpha processors as planned, but instead would adopt Intel Corp.'s just-released Itanium, the computer maker risked alienating some of its most prized customers.
But judging by NASDAQ's response and that of other Himalaya users, Compaq has thus far succeeded in winning early support for its decision.
"From my standpoint, it's a net positive," said Steven Randich, chief technology officer for NASDAQ, which uses 50 Himalaya servers to operate its core stock transaction business that has the capacity to handle more than 6 billion transactions per day.
Randich said his top concerns were that the Himalaya line continue, that the NonStop Kernal operating system it utilizes survive and that future systems be able to handle current applications. Compaq assured him on all three points.
As for the decision to adopt Intel's as-yet-unproven 64-bit chip architecture, which was released in April, he said that wasn't a problem.
"I'm comfortable with Intel. All of our Web sites, our internal surveillance systems, plus all of our networks run on Wintel," Randich said.
Compaq acquired the Himalaya line from Tandem Computer Corp. in 1997. Starting in 2003, Compaq had planned to migrate the servers away from using 64-bit processors by MIPS Technologies Inc. to instead utilize its 64-bit Alpha processors, which it acquired in 1998 from Digital Equipment Corp.
The move to Alpha appeared to draw little concern since the chip, first introduced in 1992, had gained a reputation as a reliable, high-performance processor.
But Intel, while the dominant chip maker for PCs and low-end servers, is a relative newcomer to the risk-averse high-end computing market.
Facing the inevitable
At least one Himalaya user admitted that, initially, he wasn't enthusiastic about using Intel rather than the Alpha.
Craig Foote, vice president of ASP Strategy for ALLTEL Financial Services, said he associated Intel processors with problems related to unreliable personal computers and low-end servers.
"But then I realized that it's not Intel processors that people have problems with, it's the operating systems or application programs that tend to fail on Intel boxes, not the processors themselves," said Foote.
The company, which serves more the 24 million telephone customers in the United States, has relied on Himalaya servers for more than seven years, and Foote expects that will continue through the migration.
Migrating to new technology is inevitable, and beneficial, said James Kasdorf, director of special projects at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center.
"When Cray Research introduced their highly successful T3D/T3E line, no one questioned their choice of Alpha processors, because Cray was adding significant value at the system level and Alphas were clearly the best available processing element for the job," Kasdorf said. "Compaq is now making a very similar decision, and we expect a very similar result."
Even if companies were wary of Compaq's decision, one industry analyst said, they would be hard-pressed to abandon an architecture in which they've likely invested millions of dollars and that runs their core business applications.
"It would be extremely difficult and incredibly costly," said Rob Enderle of the Giga Information Group. "People would jump out the window before letting them yank those systems out."
And while Compaq's decision to go with Itanium may have surprised some coming just weeks after the chip's launch, Enderle said the computer maker had long planned to phase out Alpha and exit the chip making business it acquired in 1998.
"Itanium was initially supposed to be out in '99, so the extra delay until now did cause a certain pain and force them to retrench and support Alpha for the short term," Enderle said. "But now they're back on track." |
