Is the Itanium 2 on the yellow brick road?

DUE THIS Summer, Madison, the third generation of the Intel Itanium Processor Family (IPF) is almost upon us and is being preceded by some notable customer wins and ISV adoption.

Let's catch up on the latest happenings.

Software Apps
SAP has just announced its global support of 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2003 and key features of SQL Server 2000 (64-bit). SAP R/3 Enterprise is already available on Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition (64-bit) along with mySAP Supply Chain Management (mySAP SCM) and SAP Advanced Planner and Optimizer (SAP APO). In October 2002, the HP rx5670 Itanium based server achieved the first certified Windows-based benchmark result for the SAP Advanced Planner and Optimizer-Demand Planning (SAP APO-DP) solution running on Microsoft Windows, as well as record-setting benchmark results for SPECweb99_SSL running Linux and for SPECjbb2000 running HP-UX

SAP also recently launched its first customer shipments of the 4.6C mySAP.com release for Linux on the 64-bit Intel Itanium 2 platform. The Intel Itanium 2 now becomes the third microprocessor architecture on which SAP products for Linux are supported, after 32-bit Intel and 64-bit zSeries Linux.

On February 12, BEA announced the availability of BEA's WebLogic Server 7.0 on HP's Itanium 2-based servers enabling customers to more easily migrate applications to Itanium-based systems and integrate legacy and Web-based applications faster than before, improving productivity and responsiveness.

In April 2003, Unisys, Microsoft and Siebel Systems announced a 30,000 concurrent user benchmark for Siebel eBusiness Applications on the Intel Itanium 2-based Unisys Enterprise Server ES7000 Orion 130 running the 64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition and Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition. So what? Two points:

1 - Siebel is taking Itanium seriously. "Siebel Systems is committed to supporting SQL Server 2000 (64-bit) running on Windows Server 2003 as one of the premier database platforms," said Richard Gorman, senior vice president, Siebel Products.

2 - The Siebel Platform Sizing and Performance Program simulates deployments across large global enterprises, which include employees, partners, and customers using Siebel Call Center, Siebel eService, Siebel Partner Relationship Management, and Siebel Interactive Selling applications. This benchmark shows that a 16-way Itanium server can handle that load effectively.

In April 2003, Microsoft launched SQL Server 2000 (64-bit) and the Windows Server 2003 operating system that run on the 64-bit Itanium 2 processors. For the first time in history, an Intel Itanium based server, the 64-way HP Superdome on a Windows, SQL Server database won the highest OLTP performance (707, 102 tpmC) benchmark for a non-clustered system.

Oracle also has production versions of Oracle 9iRAC and Oracle Application Server available on Itanium 2.

So the high visibility software is getting on board but where are the customers for these applications that now run on Itanium 2?

Follow, follow, follow, follow, follow...
At the end of 2002, Multiyork, a UK-based manufacturer and retailer of tailor-made furniture announced they will use SAP to link a complex front-end retail process to its manufacturing, finance, delivery and human resource functions using HP's Itanium based 4-way server.

In early 2003, SGI provided a 128-processor SGI Altix 3000 supercluster to Professor Stephen Hawking's Cosmology Group at the University of Cambridge to enable experts to collaborate on research to model the history of the universe from the first fractions of a second after the Big Bang to the present day, more than 10 billion years later.

Also in 2003, JetBlue a low-cost air carrier, based in New York, deployed a 16-way Itanium 2 Unisys ES7000 running Windows Server 2003 to optimize the performance of its SQL Server 2000 based customer data warehouse. "We didn't really have the transaction capabilities or the capacity to enable our business users to do real-time analysis on our data," says Adam Cohen, manager of development and chief developer. "We would have to wait until the next day to look at transaction data." With the Itanium based ES7000 in place, JetBlue now enables real-time access to data for scheduling, booking and check-in - and provides faster, more personalized customer service.

Olivier Helleboid, President, BEA Products Organization points out: "We actually have customers who are developing and deploying back end financial systems. Just think about the mission criticality and the performance and scaling requirements on a financial trading system that connects a lot of different entities to be able to actually perform a financial trade. You can't lose anything. That's exactly the sweet spot for Itanium."

In April 2003, HP announced that BP, one of the world's largest petroleum and petrochemicals companies, augmented its seismic research capabilities by adding a high- performance computing (HPC) cluster of 259 HP rx5670 systems with more than 1,000 Itanium 2 processors, providing a total of 4 teraflops and 8000 GB of memory, running on Linux at BP's Houston based advanced seismic research center. Yes, over one thousand, that's not a typo!

"To achieve the most cost-effective and productive drilling procedure, we have to gather massive sets of seismic data and analyze them quickly and accurately," said Keith Gray, manager of BP's HPC center. "The combination of HP Itanium 2-based servers running Linux and software tools and services from Intel and HP gives us the power to produce better-defined results in a fraction of the time."

In May 2003, HP announced that the Chrysler Group, a unit of DaimlerChrysler, has migrated part of its High Performance Computing (HPC) center to an Itanium 2 based HP Workstation zx6000 cluster with HP-UX using almost 200 Itanium 2 processors in a rack configuration running MSC.Software's Virtual Product Development applications. This is expected to help Chrysler improve simulation time for vehicle noise, vibration, and harshness (NVH) testing by up to 50 percent versus its former RISC-based computing environment.

Earlier, the European carmaker Fiat chose Itanium and Oracle. "Fiat sees the Itanium Processor Family as the strategic way forward, especially for our backend databases. We have therefore bought Itanium 2-based systems from HP with Oracle9i Real Application Clusters. We are planning to go into production soon after Oracle production releases are available," said Claudio San Pedro, general manager of Fiat in Spain.

Also in May 2003, SGI announced that the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) would upgrade its current SGI Origin 3000 infrastructure with a SGI Altix 3000 system powered by 416 Itanium 2 processors and 832GB of memory. The system will be installed at SARA Computing and Networking Services (the Dutch National HPC and Networking Center).

Since launching the SGI Altix 3000 in January 2003, SGI now has servers and super clusters powered by thousands of Intel Itanium 2 processors installed throughout the world, across all major technical computing markets, including life sciences, physical sciences, oil and gas, manufacturing, and government and defense environments. Developers to date have moved 43 commercially available high-performance 64- bit manufacturing, science, energy and weather modeling applications to the Linux OS environment, over half of which have certified for the Altix 3000 platform.

Also, because SGI made its Linux implementation binary- compatible with standard Linux OS environments, many developers are able to run their code efficiently on SGI Altix 3000 systems without the need to recompile.

Andy Fenselau, SGI's Director of Product Management said: "We are championing Linux for the HPC (High Performance Computing) market and are the only system vendor providing source code level support for the Linux OS. We believe the Altix 3000 with Itanium has a huge future and this is being confirmed by our increasing customer wins".

Toto, is it really happening?
These recent happenings are convincing evidence pointing to the take up of Itanium 2. But Andy Ingram, Sun's VP of Processor and Network Products points out that in his view "Itanium is the wrong processor design for network computing environments. The lack of sales for Itanium based systems as per recent market share numbers is proof of that."

He added: "Sun's UltraSPARC strategy is focused on optimizing the performance of real world network computing applications through a multi-threaded processor design. At the end of the day, what matters is how easily customers can port their applications to the new system architecture and how it performs with real workloads. We guarantee our customers and ISV partners binary compatibility from one generation of UltraSPARC to the next -- something Intel can not do with Itanium".

Intel the Tin Man says
"I don't understand Sun's logic since Itanium not only has full native, backward binary compatibility with IA-32 it also has socket level compatibility between Merced, McKinley, Madison and Montecito. This not only means IA-32 applications can run unchanged on Itanium servers but also each new Itanium processor can be swapped for the old one. This is a higher level compatibility than binary level".

She added: "And also, except for Sun, we have the support of every key industry system vendor behind us - there is a reason why".

With the customer successes and endorsements from major ISVs like SAP, Oracle and BEA plus the powerful transaction processing benchmark results from NEC, SGI and HP, the wizard of Itanium is getting stronger and nearer day by day.

Could 2003 prove to be the year for customers to delight and for Opteron, SPARC and POWER, to beware? µ

Feisal Mosleh is at Juldee, a strategic consulting firm ( www.juldee.com). Juldee has a practice dedicated to helping enterprises qualify needs, assess solutions and optimize their payback from enterprise server deployment.