Wetherhill Associates Inc., a manufacturer and distributor of automotive electronics, dropped Sun Microsystems for a Unisys system based on Itanium 2 when it upgraded its computing platform earlier this year, says Ralph Presciutti, director of IT. Wetherhill wanted to standardize its workstations and data center on a single platform, and though it would have been easier to stay with Sun, Presciutti decided to go with Unisys when he learned that overall system performance would jump by more than 300%.
But Sun, which this week takes the final wraps off its Solaris 10 operating system, and IBM, whose Power5 processor leads in the highest-performance computing segment, believe there is life beyond Wintel.
Sun says no customers have asked it to support Itanium-based systems. But it's moving aggressively to provide systems based on Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s x86-compatible Opteron processor, says John Loiacono, executive VP of Sun's software group.
Itanium suffered a setback last week when Microsoft disclosed that its Windows Server 2003 Cluster Edition, to be released in the second half of 2005, will run on systems based on 32/64-bit Opteron and Xeon processors, but not Itanium. Itanium will likely be supported in a later edition, according to a Microsoft spokeswoman.
Analysts are cautiously optimistic over Itanium's future. Says Gordon Haff, an analyst with Illuminata: "I don't see in the near to midterm a clear knockout winner between x86, Power, and Itanium in this space, but Itanium is clearly a contender."
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