FOCUS ENTERPRISE IT UPDATE
Issue 16, June/July
FOCUS UPDATE: ENTERPRISE IT
I
n late March, Oracle lit the blue touch paper when it declared it would discontinue software development for Intel’s Itanium, saying it was coming to the end of its life. This was promptly denied by Intel the following day. In a statement, Paul Otellini, Intel CEO, said: “Intel’s work on Itanium continues unabated, with multiple generations of chips currently in development and on schedule.” HP also waded into the argument, accusing Oracle of making misleading statements.
“We remain fi rmly committed to delivering a competitive, multi-generational roadmap for HP-UX and other operating system customers that run the Itanium architecture,” Otellini said.
The next generation of Itanium chips will be the 32nm 8-core Poulson, which the company said will double performance of the existing Tukwila architecture.
KITTSON DEVELOPMENT Another
Itanium product development – the one that currently in will succeed
Poulson – is Kittson. Intel said it was offi cially committed to the Kittson roadmap.
The background to all this may be as simple as a clash of egos and personalities.
Mark Hurd was forced to leave his job as CEO of HP in January and almost immediately took the job of President at Oracle after receiving very public support from Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who blasted the HP board for forcing his friend out.
HP attempted to apply a legal injunction against its former employee but was forced to back down.
An analysis by industry watchers Ptak/Noel raised the question of whether users of IBM’s Power Chip Architecture should be concerned about Oracle withdrawing development for this architecture.
At face value, this seems highly unlikely as, 56
www.datacenterdynamics.com
IBM’s Power7 architecture can almost be matched for performance at one-fi fth of the cost, the man who leads the Intel’s server CPU designs told DatacenterDynamics.
Speaking as Intel refreshed its Xeon line with 2800, 4800 and 8800 models of its processor, Rory McInerney, VP of CPU architecture, said that the company’s latest products, which added 25% more cores to the Xeon E7 family bringing it to 10 cores, was “taking a lot of legacy infrastructure out of the data center and delivering a much more effi cient solution”.
He said: “We see a lot of value in hardware and software provisioning in the common infrastructure space. We have some data showing E7 versus Sparc and E7 versus Power. If you wanted to replace your Oracle Sun Sparc systems, if it was a 5440 system you would get 160% performance improvement at half the cost. If it was a Sparc M4000 system, you would get 7x performance, again at half the cost. If you go to an [IBM] Power server
POLITICAL PROCESSORS In IT marketing terms Intel stole the show in April with its 3d processor announcement. For mission-critical operators, however, the E7 Xeon refresh and Itanium roadmap developments in the preceding weeks were of more importance. By Ambrose McNevin
despite its dominant position in the database market the analyst cited fi gures saying that Power represents 40% of Oracle’s total Unix revenue of about US$3bn.
What is surprising is that the whole episode didn’t raise more questions about the future of Sparc, Oracle’s Risc-based processor architecture. To date the last that was heard about the Sparc roadmap was in December last year, so some form of update is due.
MISSION-CRITICAL PLAY
Away from Itanium, Intel’s other mission- critical play is in its Xeon product line. This received a major refresh, which prompted the company to say it was ready to go after the US$18bn market of non-X86 server sales in the mission-critical space.
Intel said its latest Xeon processor will
almost match the IBM Power7 architecture in performance and will outgun Oracle’s Sparc processor models 5440 and M4000 by 160% and 7x performance, respectively, at just 50% of the cost in each case.
versus a Power7, you have almost 100% of the performance at one-fi fth the cost.”
McInerney said that the big competitors will be Oracle and IBM. “They are customers [for the latest processors] as [both Oracle and IBM] have hardware and software announcements accompanying the Xeon E7 launch.”
He said it was in the Risc Unix pace where the companies would compete on architecture, with X86 going up against Sparc and IBM’s Power processor architectures.
“Rather than saying how they will react we have been very successful in winning against legacy systems – and the numbers show that. The amount of system revenue that was in [non x86] legacy systems was much larger a few years ago, and now it is either fl at or down,” McInerney said.
PRODUCT SPEC OVERVIEW: E7 8800, 4800, 2800
• 10 core; 20-thread processing • Scales to 256 sockets
• 32GB Dimm support; UP to 2TB per four-socket system
• 102GB/s memory bandwidth • Up to 30MB last level caching • 32nm process technology
• LV DIMM support with reduced memory buff ers
Additional features, not in earlier versions
• Intel Advanced Encryption Standard – new instructions. AES N for the protection of sensitive assets and private data in enterprise and cloud computing
• Intel Trusted Execution Technology – for protection prior to virtualization deployments
See more enterprise IT articles at
www.datacenterdynamics.com
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