| Itanium bandwagon stuck
in neutral?
16 March, 2006
By Paul Weinberg
Systems builders are adopting a "wait and see"
attitude towards Itanium based systems, said Michelle Warren,
an IT industry analyst at Evans Research Corp.
Itanium processors systems are largely used in mission-critical
large enterprise database solutions on big iron high end servers.
There may be greater opportunities for system builders in
the rapidly expanding market for the x86 servers which continue
to scale upward into the enterprise space, added Warren.
According to Alan Freedman, research manager in infrastructure
hardware at IDC, Itanium sales could more than double by the
end of 2010, albeit on a small base.
However, Martin Reynolds, an analyst at Gartner, sees more
possibilities for Itanium based systems within five years.
He predicts that at that point Itanium sales will double those
systems running on the Intel Xeon processor.
"In five years if Xeon has eight cores (technology).
Itanium might have 16 cores." Furthermore, he is less
bullish about the prospects of the x86 heading into the higher
enterprise space. He describes the x86 as less satisfactory
in the area of scalability, performance and the ability to
handle heavy application work loads. This is where Itanium
based systems should shine, he stated.
Currently, the enterprise market is not ready to embrace
Itanium because it is a technology that has been slow to blossom,
said Reynolds. "The market values stability over performance."
One possible opportunity for systems builders, he added,
might lie in the off-the-shelf components that accompany Microsoft
Sequel Server on an Itanium box.
The other matter for the Gartner analyst is that the small
collection of 7,100 enterprise applications running on Itanium
systems are not any better or different than what is available
on systems running on other processors.
Intel's Doug Cooper countered that 7,100 is not a small number.
"In the large enterprise you don't use as many applications
as you do in lower end systems." Cooper also confirmed
that Itanium's possibilities are more long-term.
Systems builders are more likely to be attracted to AMD and
Intel Xeon-based systems than Itanium "which is too high
end for them," stated Rob Enderle, the principal for
the Enderle Group. "A few (systems builders) messed with
Itanium early on, but it wasn't practical for them."
Enderle raises the bigger issue of AMD's dominance in the
retail, consumer and small business space, where system builders
also thrive. "You have folks that are generically Intel
but those are fewer and fewer. They are pretty well down to
Dell and Toshiba. Intel owns the enterprise."
"The workstation space is shared between systems on
AMD's Opteron and Intel Xeon. Itanium has pretty much dropped
out of workstations and only exists in the very large server
space."
Intel delayed the introduction of the 64 bit version of Xeon
because of the concern that its systems would "cannibalize"
Itanium sales, said Enderle.
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