Alpha ahead by a nose in 64-bit
sprint
Vendors vie for top spot in processing power
By Stephanie Neil, PC Week Online
October 26, 1998 9:00 AM ET
Ray Mooney loves a good horse race. And as
a customer of Digital Equipment Corp.,
Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM, he's got a
front-row seat in the vendors' contest to deliver
64-bit processing power to customers.
Mooney, the manager of SAP integration
technologies at chemical manufacturer Solutia
Inc., has mostly been content to observe the
competition from the sidelines. That is, until
last year, when he began deploying SAP AG's
R/3. He started the rollout on HP
PA-RISC-based servers running HP-UX, but
when the platform seemed stretched, he took
a more active interest in backing the best
64-bit player. After SAP's ERP (enterprise
resource planning) modules were migrated to
Alpha, Mooney decided to cast his bet with
Digital's architecture.
"We believed the Alpha 64-bit technology was the way to go," says
Mooney, in Pensacola, Fla. "It would take one and a half HP [servers] to do
what one Alpha could do."
Purebred power
This kind of thoroughbred performance is now more critical than ever to
corporations deploying ERP or data mining applications that deal with
enormous amounts of data and thousands of concurrent users. As a result,
Digital could find itself in the winner's circles of global corporations after
years of stumbling over its own marketing mishaps. Call it a rebound, but
Digital is back, promoting the only fully developed 64-bit chip for Windows
NT, a solid Unix operating environment and renewed efforts by its owner,
Compaq Computer Corp., to push Alpha technology.
Earlier this month, Compaq executives offered attendees at DECUS (Digital
Equipment Computer Users Society), the annual Digital users conference,
a revealing glimpse at the capabilities of next-generation Alpha chips,
including a 1GHz processor, dubbed EV7, due in 2000; the eight-way
design, EV8; and talk of ongoing EV9 and EV10 work in the research labs.
Painting Alpha's direction that far into the future is comforting to analysts
and Alpha customers, who were unsure of the chip's future after Compaq's
acquisition of Digital earlier this year. Most were concerned because Intel
Corp. had been put in charge of the Alpha fabrication plant in Hudson,
Mass., as part of a patent infringement settlement suit filed by Digital last
year. Also, Compaq didn't pledge full support for the chip until June, a
month after Intel announced that its own 64-bit processor, Merced, would
be delayed six more months until the middle of 2000.
As a result, analysts and customers are taking a different view of the
once-hobbled processor. "The future of Alpha is damn secure," says Terry
Shannon, author of Shannon Knows Distributed Enterprise Computing, a
newsletter based in Ashland, Mass.
Strategic sense
Digital's perceived comeback is good news for customers who need 64-bit
processing power today. HP's 64-bit chip is delayed, since it's tied to Intel's
Merced. IBM this month announced upgrades to its 64-bit line for Unix, and
while Sun Microsystems Inc.'s SPARC has many 64-bit characteristics,
experts say its functionality is not yet adequate. Even when these 64-bit
chips become a reality, the technologies will be new. That's always a
concern, given that new designs are often fraught with flaws, according to
industry analysts.
"If a customer really wants a 64-bit environment today, they don't have a lot
of choices. ... [But] Alpha is a good choice," says Linley Gwennap, editor
of The Microprocessor Report, in Sunnyvale, Calif. However, the challenge
for Digital and Compaq, Gwennap notes, is getting Sun, HP and IBM
customers to listen and buy into an entirely new chip architecture.
To do that, Compaq and Digital must sell more than their ability to come in
first in the 64-bit derby. Mooney is among those who say that Alpha's
64-bit computing power was just part of the decision to go with the chip. "If
you make an ERP decision just on the 64-bit [capability], you'll be in big
trouble," Mooney says. "Yes, 64-bit does make a difference in an ERP
environment where there are 2,000 concurrent users, but there are a lot of
other things to look at, too."
For instance, there was a lot of synchronization between SAP R/3 and
Digital's Multivendor Service and Support unit, where Digital remains one of
the largest SAP service providers. In addition, SAP and Oracle Corp.'s
relational DBMS, which Mooney relies on, are moving toward being more
intranet-driven. This will be a boon for Mooney because it will ease the
distribution and management of applications throughout the company's
worldwide offices.
Mooney's data center, which links Solutia's global offices in the
Asia-Pacific region, Europe, South America and the United States,
includes three separate clusters of multiprocessing Alpha servers. One
includes the enterprise reference data where all of the master data is
managed. A second runs the financial modules, and a third cluster of Alpha
servers runs the manufacturing, purchase, sales and distribution
applications.
For Solutia, Digital offered the best overall solution. "A lot of the [decision
making] is culture-driven," Mooney says. "Solutia has a good comfort level
with Digital. They have great services, and we try to help each other
succeed."
Others, unfortunately, don't carry the same level of respect for Digital
products and say the need for a 64-bit chip to run an ERP environment is
eclipsed by the bigger picture of vendor stability. That's why, when George
Bedar last year took over as CIO at CKE Restaurants Inc., in Anaheim,
Calif., he made a strategic decision to move the company's PeopleSoft Inc.
ERP applications off Compaq ProLiant servers and onto Sun E4000 and
E4500 servers. He had concerns about the capability of NT and the
Intel-based servers to scale with the company's needs. When the decision
was made last summer, Sun won over HP and IBM. Digital wasn't even in
the running.
"Digital wasn't doing very well at the time, and to me, it was a risk," Bedar
says. "We don't want to go through a huge upgrade and end up in a
situation where our architecture is not well-supported."
Bedar is more optimistic about Alpha now that Compaq is steering the
company. Still, it won't cause him to change course, despite the 64-bit
lure. "I have the ability in my Sun architecture to add more CPUs to boxes
or keep the main components and swap out the CPU if they move to a
more sophisticated processor, so I have a lot of flexibility. And our
performance is much better than what we had previously," he says.
Nose to nose
Compaq might have quashed some of the fears of long-term viability for
Alpha, but if the company really wants to compete head-on with Intel, it
needs to attract new Alpha customers. Analysts are betting on Compaq to
make significant strides in getting Alpha recognized and winning over any
customers sitting on the fence between waiting for Intel/HP's Merced and
taking advantage of 64-bit power today.
They argue that to wait could mean that corporations fall behind in ERP
development plans, and even when Merced does arrive, it is unlikely that
there will be many 64-bit applications to run on it, despite Intel's claim that
vendors are lining up to deliver Merced-compatible applications.
Still, analysts are wary. "You can count on your hand how many new
applications will run on Merced," says Jim Garden, an analyst at
Technology Business Research Inc., in Hampton, N.H.
On the other hand, there are about 12,000 applications available today that
run on the 64-bit Alpha processor. And according to Compaq officials, in
Houston, the company is forging relationships with Oracle Corp., Informix
Software Corp., Sybase Inc., PeopleSoft Inc., SAP and Baan Co. to
continue to align ERP applications and 64-bit computing for customers.
To counter, Intel came out fighting earlier this month, announcing that
Merced will provide backward compatibility to run existing 32-bit
applications. But analysts say that maneuver defeats the purpose of the
architecture. "Why take an exotic machine and run it in backward
compatibility mode?" Garden asks.
Even Intel's argument that NT won't be 64-bit enabled until Version 5.0
arrives in late 1999 or 2000 falls a bit short of the mark, analysts say. They
contend that most customers who need 64-bit performance are not going to
bother with NT, and that Unix, which is robust and stable, is the best option
for enterprise applications.
Compaq is buttressing these arguments by embarking on a campaign to
prove that Alpha is here to stay. First, Compaq had to convince existing
customers. And it appears it's making progress by placing company
executives at DECUS to reiterate the company's commitment to Digital
Unix, OpenVMS and Alpha.
"I have no reason to be pessimistic at this time," says one Alpha customer
and DECUS attendee who requested anonymity. "Compaq seems
genuinely interested in doing a good job in enterprise computing, and I look
forward to seeing how it works out."
Now Compaq must convince others to make the move. But it is not going
to pit Alpha against Merced, because Compaq will continue to support the
Intel processor in its ProLiant server series. Instead, the company plans to
offer the two as complementary solutions. "We'll work with corporations
that have traditionally had more business with Compaq than with Digital,"
says Brian Croxon, Compaq's vice president of Alpha server business, in
Maynard, Mass.
Compaq will also leverage major system integrators to help sell Alpha,
perhaps partnering up and offering incentive packages so integrators push
Alpha platforms, analysts say. Compaq's Croxon confirmed that the
company is working with major system integrators but declined to offer
specifics about the form the relationships will take.
Compaq will have to continue in this vein to prove its commitment to Alpha
before users latch on for the long term. However, it has a good chance of
keeping its lead, given that the strongest contender, Merced, is not even in
the running yet, and other competitors are slow out of the gate.
"It's not a horse race yet--it's an open field opportunity for Compaq," says
Technology Business Research's Garden. |
