The Itanium Solutions Blog

A recently published whitepaper from Alinean VP and Senior Analyst, Paul Demopoulos took an in-depth look at HP-UX 11i on Itanium-based Integrity Servers vs. Red Hat Linux on IBM x86 Servers.

From the abstract:

“This paper analyzes the three year lifecycle TCO of two alternative platforms, considering the costs to plan, purchase, implement, manage, and use two comparable server configurations for a specified scenario, application, and workload. The comparisons in this study use HP-UX 11i, a UNIX solution hosted on an open system platform using HP Integrity servers (Intel® Itanium®-based servers with 4, 8 and 16 cores depending on function) versus Red Hat Linux running on IBM x86 servers and quantifies how open systems UNIX solutions running on Intel Itanium servers can deliver higher levels of manageability, consolidation, virtualization, adaptability, security, and availability. As a result of the analysis, HP-UX 11i running on HP Integrity servers provides substantially more benefits in business critical computing environments, delivering higher levels of consolidation to deliver total cost of ownership (TCO) savings of more than 20% compared to Red Hat Linux on IBM x86 servers.”

Get the whitepaper here.

Alliance president Joan Jacobs and I were honored to represent the Itanium Solutions Alliance at the recent Annual Summit of the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals (ASAP). At the Awards dinner, the group honored the Alliance with its “Long-Established Alliance Award.”

The Association recognized the unique value that the Itanium Solutions Alliance has brought to the Itanium ecosystem since its founding. The Association also noted that the Alliance is unique in how competitors have come together in a collaborative environment to benefit customers who use Itanium-based solutions.

The Alliance beat out companies like IBM and EMC is this year’s program, and previous winners in the Long-Established Alliance award category include The Walt Disney Company and Coca-Cola. The Alliance is in good company indeed!

Read more about the Alliance’s award winning work in the press release.

Congratulations to all Itanium Solutions Alliance Sponsors, Charter Members, and Members! You all played a part in making this award a reality.

It’s no secret that the proposed acquisition of Sun by Oracle has got many Sun customers looking for options. But swapping out servers, especially Sun SPARC systems running mission-critical applications, is no simple task.

While IBM has been slashing it’s prices to lure Sun customers to a new home, recent articles from Server Watch and eWeek announced that HP’s “Sun Complete Care” program will now receive software support through partnerships with Microsoft, Novell, and Red Hat.

Sun Complete Care participants can choose between HP ProLiant servers and HP’s Itanium-based Integrity server line aimed at the mission-critical marketplace. Lorraine Bartlett, vice president of marketing strategy and operation for HP’s business-critical systems said:

According to HP, about 350 Sun customers have made the move to HP over the past year.

As rumors swirl in the marketplace regarding a possible merger of IBM and Sun Microsystems – a merger that would create a behemoth of proprietary architectures in a market increasingly looking for open standards-based solutions – one can’t help but ponder some very basic questions. Specifically:

• - What is IBM going to do with two proprietary microprocessor architectures? Not only is it extremely cost-prohibitive to continue support for separate R&D and manufacturing operations for two different architectures that serve basically the same markets, but it also creates confusion, uncertainly, and doubt with customers.
• - How long would IBM really continue to support two proprietary chip architectures? Two competing UNIX operating systems? Two competing blade systems? Two storage portfolios? Two competing services organizations? The list goes on and on. It’s hard to see the synergy or any economies of scale. If I were a Sun customer today, I would be feeling more than a little uneasy.
• - “Don’t get burned” has been IBM’s messaging about Sun and Sun’s technology for years. In the long term, what value does the IBM portfolio offer Sun customers? What value do IBM customers gain from what Sun brings to the table? Does the ability to include Java in its software portfolio make it all worthwhile?

The cost of swallowing Sun’s underwhelming portfolio – of which they have been critical for years – will be high. From my perspective, IBM seems bent on furthering its proprietary agenda and eliminating options for customers seeking a “best value” model.

Whatever the case, this questionable acquisition offers an excellent opportunity for mission-critical computing customers to evaluate their alternatives. What has been an ongoing battle between Power, SPARC, and Itanium is now essentially a two horse race. IDC data mapping Itanium-based server revenue to SPARC-based and Power-based revenue has shown Itanium rapidly gaining on both architectures and exceeding the revenue of one or both in key global markets. Given the issues that IBM will have to deal with to swallow Sun, I believe Itanium-based servers will continue to grow share.

Customers now have an even clearer choice for their mission-critical platform requirements; one that offers a robust architecture roadmap, an open standards-based platform, solutions available from leading computer manufacturers worldwide, a choice of ten Operating Systems, and an ecosystem of nearly 14,000 applications.