Implementation of Intel`s Itanium processors has been relatively slow, but that is beginning to change, says Kevin Barnard, Itanium product manager for Hewlett-Packard (HP) SA.
"Organisations did not jump at Itanium from the very beginning due to the general uncertainty caused by continual waves of short-lived new technologies," he explains.
"The market was sceptical of where Itanium was going, but ever since the launch of its Itanium-based products, HP has said exactly what it was going to do and has stuck 100% to that roadmap, with the result that over the past year we are seeing a lot more customers willing to test Itanium in their environments," says Barnard.
HP also ascribes the increased willingness of organisations to test Itanium to the fact that companies are demanding more value for money and requiring IT to be more responsive to changing business needs.
"HP`s Itanium-based products are standards-based and flexible, enabling organisations to run Windows, Linux, OpenVMS and HP-UX on the same box simultaneously," says Barnard.
"IT is beginning to realise business will invest in technologies that can accommodate change and that is why HP`s drive is towards synchronising IT and business to capitalise on change."
In SA, the fastest growth of HP Itanium-based business so far has been in the financial services and manufacturing sectors. "Itanium enables organisations to move away from technologies that lock them in and prevent them from experimenting to discover which operating system is best suited to their environment," says Barnard.
HP recently announced several innovations to its Integrity server line, including a move to Intel`s Itanium 2 9M processor with 9MB cache.
"With the new Itanium processors, HP Integrity servers show up to a 25% performance improvement over their Itanium 2 6M predecessors," says Barnard.
The move to the next generation of faster Itanium processors with more cache memory has enabled HP to introduce several enhancements to the Integrity server range`s virtualisation capabilities.
"Virtualisation allows enterprises to achieve a greater return on their IT investments by optimising server resource utilisation in real-time according to business priorities," says Barnard.
Another indication of the growing market acceptance of Itanium technology is the number of applications that have been developed for HP`s Itanium-based platform, with 3 000 applications certified in two years.
"This is the fastest growth from an application development point of view than ever before," declares Barnard. "Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) took years before all the basic applications were in place."
Barnard believes that at the heart of HP`s commitment to Itanium is the realisation that although HP`s Precision Architecture (PA) RISC is able to run single parallel lines of data through a processor quicker than any 32-bit chip, there is a limit to what can be achieved.
"In PA RISC there comes a point where you cannot go any further. But with Itanium, we have been able blend existing algorithms to achieve multiple lines of data through the processor, forming the basis of the next generation of processing technology," says Barnard.
"HP`s commitment to Itanium is demonstrated by the fact that it is the only vendor in the world that has a product range from two CPUs to 128 CPUs, enabling it to support organisations across a breadth of products," he concludes.
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