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To: Piotr Koziol who wrote (2240)	11/20/2002 10:28:41 AM
From: The Duke of URL©	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4345

Dell to produce Itanium 2 computers By Michael Kanellos Staff Writer, CNET News.com November 19, 2002, 9:30 PM PT Breaking news Hot products CNET Radio live LAS VEGAS--Despite being one of the more visible skeptics of Intel's Itanium chip family, Dell Computer will incorporate the Itanium 2 chip into future high-powered computers, a company executive said Tuesday. The Austin, Texas-based computer giant will come out with computers containing Intel's latest 64-bit chip, called Itanium 2, according to Joe Marengi, senior vice president for Dell's Americas division. "We will support Intel all the way on this...We will have an IA-64 2 (Itanium 2) product on our roadmap," Marengi said in an interview with CNET News.com at Comdex Fall 2002 here. "The technology is totally solid." The change of mood on Itanium 2 seems to close the book on one of the more florid server melodramas of the past year. Itanium is Intel's entry into the market for chips for high-end servers, a lucrative field dominated by Unix systems containing chips from Sun Microsystems, IBM and Hewlett-Packard. While it scores high on benchmark tests, Itanium has not sold because of product delays and a lack of software, according to analysts and high-tech executives. To run well, Itanium requires different software than Intel's Xeon or Pentium chips, which process data in 32-bit chunks. Chips that process data in 64-bit chunks, such as Sun's UltraSparc and Itanium, can digest twice as much data at once. Among other benefits, these 64-bit machines can handle more than 4GB of memory--the limit for 32-bit machines. Still, the performance benefits are simply theoretical if the software doesn't exist. Although both HP and IBM have come out with Itanium machines, Dell has been more cautious. Dell released a workstation containing the original Itanium chip in 2001, but then quietly pulled it off the market. At Comdex last year, Marengi said that demand for Itanium servers in the current economic climate was "effectively zero." Dell came out with a server containing the first version of Itanium in 2001, but then held off on adopting Itanium 2, which came out this past summer. Simultaneously, Dell began a fairly public flirtation with Advanced Micro Devices, which next year will come out with Opteron, a server chip that can run software written for Xeon and Pentium chips as well as 64-bit versions of these applications. Opteron represents an easy path to the 64-bit club for PC makers, according to analysts. CEO Michael Dell and other company executives have said that Dell has been testing Opteron for the past year. Recently, company representatives have said that Dell will make its 64-bit decision clear by the end of the year. While Marengi declined to discuss Opteron in depth, he noted that the benchmark scores of Itanium are relatively strong and that the path for adoption among corporate customers seems inevitable. "Over time, that (Itanium) is going to be the technology that takes hold," he said. Last year he was negative on Itanium, but "this year I am in a neutral-to-positive stance," he added. Still, Dell has not committed to how or when it will adopt Itanium. The technology downturn has put a damper on server purchases. SoundView Technology analyst Mark Speckter said that Dell's vacillation over the past year was largely for show. Adopting AMD chips would have required Dell to design completely new computers as well as stock additional parts. Servers running AMD chips have also historically been shunned by corporate buyers, he added. Meanwhile, Microsoft has continued to pledge its support to Itanium. Itanium has been "not a matter of if they (Dell) do it, it is a matter of when," Speckter said. Scott Randall, also an analyst at SoundView, said that Opteron was also hurt by delays. If the chip had come out six months ago, it would have posed more of a competitive threat, he said. Neither Intel nor AMD representatives could be reached for comment.

To: Piotr Koziol who wrote (2240)	11/20/2002 3:31:00 PM
From: The Duke of URL©	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4345

This is what Microsoft is doing for Dell, do you think HP can get it together before april???? I dunno maybe the future is in the Pac-Pilots. (from InfoWorld) Microsoft releases SQL Server betas By Paul Krill November 20, 2002 9:31 am PT SEATTLE -- MICROSOFT on Wednesday at the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) Summit will announce it has released beta 2 of its planned SQL Server 2000 64-bit database as well as a beta of a service pack for the existing SQL Server 2000 database. The new SQL Server 64-bit beta release includes optimization for the Intel Itanium 2 chip and performance improvements, according to Microsoft. The 64-bit version of SQL Server is intended to support memory-intensive and performance-critical applications and will scale to large e-commerce Web sites that have a potentially unbounded number of users and a high volume of user transactions, the company said. This latest version also is intended for large data warehousing and analysis applications and line-of-business applications with a high OLTP workload. The forthcoming SQL Server will reach the released-to-manufacturing stage, a precursor to general public availability, in a few months and be generally available in April 2003 with the launch of the Windows .Net Server 2003 64-bit operating system. The 64-bit database will scale to 512GB of RAM and support as many as 64 CPUs. By comparison, the current SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition database scales to just 64GB of RAM and as many as 64 CPUs. "In our beta 1 program, we're seeing our customers really start to use [the 64-bit database] for big data warehousing projects," because of the extra memory available, said Sheryl Tullis product manager for SQL Server, in Redmond, Wash. The company also will release details of SQL Server Service Pack 3 beta 1 for the existing 32-bit SQL Server 2000 database. In addition to all the fixes in the first two service packs, the new service pack features analysis services including remote partitions support to boost scalability and support for third-party data mining algorithms. The SQL Server Agent logging feature, for logging transactions, is improved via the service pack, as are replication performance and reliability. In the area of serviceability, SQL Server can be configured to have critical errors automatically sent to Microsoft. A new monitoring API allows DBAs or third-party tools to diagnose problem processes. "If you have processes that could be blocking another process, you could do some analysis on that," Tullis said. Multiserver administration also is improved. To enhance security, the service pack features updated online books to provide customers with more guidance on security. Patches are included for known vulnerabilities. Additionally, SQL Server Agent can be run in a non-administrator fashion. The agent can trigger alerts if an abnormal process is happening. Users interested in the two beta programs can log onto Microsoft's Web site at www.microsoft.com/sql/evaluation/betanominations.asp to express an interest in participating. Paul Krill is editor at large at InfoWorld.