Unisys Says ES7000 Shops Still Want Itanium Despite Xeon-64

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

With all the noise about the new 64-bit extended Xeons and what this means for the future of Intel 64-bit Itanium processor, it is easy to forget that why Hewlett-Packard had the inside track with the Itanium architecture and stands to benefit the most as Itanium ramps up, Unisys is also a big player in the high-end X86 server market with its ES7000 enterprise servers. While Unisys is eager to embrace the new Xeon-64 chips, the company believes, as does Intel and HP, that over the long haul the enterprise server future will be one dominated by Itanium.

For one thing, if you want a high-end ES7000 server with 8, 16, or 32 processors and a large main memory that scales beyond 64 GB, you can't choose the 32-bit "Gallatin" Xeons because they can't address more than 64 GB and you can't choose the "Potomac" Xeon MP processors with 64-bit extensions that will allow them to address more than 64 GB because the Potomacs will not be delivered until some time in the first half of 2005. So, for big jobs requiring lots of bandwidth and main memory, that leaves the ES7000 Aries servers, can have up to 16 of Intel's 1.5 GHz "Madison" Itanium processors and support for 128 GB of main memory, or the ES7000 Orion processors, which span to 32 Madison chips (partitioned into two 16-ways) and support for 256 GB of main memory (partitioned into two 128 GB memories). Or, if you can cram your workload into a 64 GB space, you can opt for an ES7000 using the Gallatin processors, but you will need roughly twice as many Gallatins to do transaction processing as it would take Itaniums. With software being priced by processor, not by the amount of performance processors actually deliver, there are some strong incentives to go with the fastest chip possible. Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition only supports a maximum of 512 GB of main memory at the moment, although with 64-bit memory, a much larger memory space is theoretically possible.

This is probably one reason why the uptake for Itanium-based ES7000s has been stronger than Unisys expected. According to Mark Feverston, vice president of platform marketing for enterprise servers at Unisys, last year Itanium-based ES7000s accounted for about 30 percent of sales, about twice what the company expected it would do. Like other IT suppliers in the server racket, Unisys has known for quite some time that Intel had a 64-bit Xeon contingency plan. How long, Unisys will not say, but Feverston says that Intel usually lets server vendors in on what is coming at least 18 months in advance, sometimes even early. These briefings are usually about the options that Intel might use to beef up its servers, and then no one says anything for a while, and then suddenly Intel has made a decision and server makers have to react rather quickly. If the Xeon-Opteron-Itanium quandary presents a problem for customers, suffice it to say that that it also presents one for server makers.

That said, Unisys has designed the ES7000s to support whatever processor architecture it seems necessary to drive revenue, including its Sperry and Burroughs Clearpath mainframes and Xeon and Itanium processors. Feverston says that for the companies that Unisys is chasing with Windows Datacenter Server who already have RISC/Unix servers in the datacenter, going with what is most like what they currently have is what they will choose. "When they put something on the floor, they want something that has many years in it," he says. And that means, for many of them, choosing an Itanium server. "Itanium is still the safest and most extensible roadmap going forward." For those customers who choose Windows, Unisys is, like HP, a serious contender for big Windows-Itanium iron.

That said, Feverston says that the announcement of the 64-bit Xeons fits right in with the company's two prong strategy of selling Aries-class Xeon machines to 32-bit Windows customers who have outgrown four-way servers and selling big Itanium iron to Unix shops. To that end, Unisys is going to let the market decide between Xeon and Itanium. "We are going to follow both technologies with vigor." He thinks that the extra memory addressing will hurt the kind of clustering and scale out arguments that Oracle and Dell have been pushing really hard. "Some customers just do not want federated databases and they do not want to scale out. They want to scale up."

When asked if there is a place for the Opteron processor in the ES7000 product line, Feverston said that at the moment that the techies at and customers of Unisys do not think so. Most customers are trying to cut down on the number of platforms they support, and adding Opteron into the mix adds complexity. "I'm not saying there isn't a market for Opteron," he explains. "There just isn't one at the high end of the server market."

The customers that Unisys talks to think that Opteron is interesting, but still risky and unproven compared to Xeon or Itanium. Nonetheless, as the ES7000 architecture that is used across four different platforms demonstrates, and as Feverston concedes, Unisys could drop Opterons into ES7000s if it wanted to. "We can make anything we want, but will the clients buy it?"