Dell Begrudgingly Launches Four-Way Itanium Box

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Server maker Dell this week announced a four-way server based on the "Madison" Itanium 2 processors in what appears to be a genuine attempt to capitalize on the benefits of the Itanium architecture now that 64-bit Windows and Linux operating systems seem to be maturing enough to be used in production. This is not Dell's first foray into the four-way Itanium space, but it does appear that Dell is going to try to sell this machine where it makes sense to.

Dell's first Itanium box--and the only one it sold for two years--was the four-way PowerEdge 7150, which the company announced in May 2001 as the first generation "Merced" Itaniums, running at 733 MHz and 800 MHz, finally entered the market about two years later than expected. That machine could support 64 GB of main memory, 144 GB of internal storage, and 10 PCI slots, which made it a considerable server in terms of storage and I/O capacity. But the Merced processors were not stellar performers and there was a paucity of software for them, so not surprisingly, the PowerEdge 7150 was a dud. Dell, to its credit, got out there with the biggest Merced box that Intel's technology could deliver, and it was a waste of time for all but the few developers who needed a big Merced machine to do software development for future Itaniums.

Dell didn't talk much about Itanium in 2002 and throughout early 2003, but last July, when it became clear that the Madison Itanium 2 processors had excellent performance on certain floating point applications popular in the high performance computing (HPC) industry, the company announced the two-way PowerEdge 3250 so it could chase Linux clustering deals. Dell is still selling this machine, which is a 2U rack-mounted server that supports the Madison chips running at 1.4 GHz and 1.5 GHz and the low-power "Deerfield" variants of the Itanium 2 running at 1 GHz and 1.4 GHz. The PowerEdge 3250 supports up to 16 GB of main memory, and supports Microsoft's 64-bit version of the Enterprise Edition of Windows Server 2003 as well as Red Hat's Linux Workstation 2.1, Advanced Server 2.1, and Enterprise Linux 3.

The four-way PowerEdge 7250 only supports up to 32 GB of main memory, and runs the 1.3 GHz, 1.4 GHz, or 1.5 GHz versions of the Madison chip, which has larger L3 cache memory than the Deerfield processors. This helps for the big database clustering jobs that Dell is envisioning this box for. Dell is supporting Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 and Red Hat's Linux Server 3 on the box, which comes in a 4U rack-mounted chassis that can support three hot-plug SCSI drives in 36 GB or 73 GB capacities. The machine has eight hot-plus PCI-X slots, a dual-channel Ultra320 SCSI controller, a RAID disk controller, and a single Gigabit Ethernet port standard in the box. A base PowerEdge 7250 machine with a single 1.3 GHz Madison, 2 GB of main memory, a single 36 GB, and no operating system costs $12,499; a four-way machine using the 1.5 GHz Madisons with 16 GB of main memory and three 36 GB, 15K RPM disks costs $51,046. It costs a few grand to add Linux or Windows on top of that. The odds favor that the majority of shipments for this machine will end up running Windows. For one thing, the price/performance of buying two two-way Itanium servers and clustering them is a lot better than buying one four-way for clustered technical applications that are driving Linux sales on Itanium. Windows is not big in the high-performance-computing cluster market, but is getting traction as a clustered database platform and is a dominant platform for stand-alone database machines used by midrange companies. This is a big box for a lot of companies.