HP is doing a lot of explaining after it revealed this
weekend that it will no longer put Itanium processors in its
high-performance workstations.
The company said its decision
was based on a lack of 64-bit software applications from Microsoft and the trend toward 64-bit extension Xeon chips coming from Intel
and AMD’s
Opteron.
A spokesperson
for Microsoft was not immediately available for comment.
HP said it will discontinue its Zx2000 and Zx6000 towers.
HP said it would continue to take
orders until the end of October and would offer support for these systems for the next
five years.
The company also reiterated that it would still continue to support the
64-bit EPIC-based processors, which it co-developed with Intel, for its
Integrity high-performance server family.
Don Jenkins, vice president of marketing for Business Critical Servers at
HP, told internetnews.com the Itanium story is one of two markets:
one that is developing and one that is still getting started.
“HP is a big Windows vendor, and the majority of our workstations — about
70 percent — run Windows programs,” Jenkins said. “Our
workstation family is just an extension of the PC business. As it has grown,
the Windows side is predominately 32-bit applications and is not making very
many moves on the 64-bit side. We saw too limited an opportunity to invest
there and to ask our ISV partners to stay on this. For application
providers, the opportunity to bring their apps to Itanium is offset with the
decision to re-engineer their entire software architecture.”
The company’s server side is having an easier time selling Itanium, with
at least one-third of HP’s Integrity servers also running Microsoft
programs, according to Jenkins.
In contrast to the company’s workstations, Integrity servers specialize in intensive computing problems, such
as weather analysis, data mining and crash demo modeling. The top list of
applications running on Itanium include Microsoft SQL server, SAP, Oracle
and then Microsoft Windows 2003.
However, while HP continues to be a leader with its Itanium shipments —
up some 500 percent according to the latest Gartner numbers — Jenkins said
HP’s market share is eroding to companies like NEC, Hitachi and SGI when it
comes to Itanium projects.
Jenkins also said the door is still open for Itanium to return to the
workstation market should the numbers pick back up. Still, dropping an
opportunity to sell a product that it spent billions on in development has
raised a few eyebrows.
“Workstations are not servers, and HP walking away from this segment of
the market doesn’t imply that it will walk away from Itanium in servers,”
Gordon Haff, senior analyst and IT advisor at market research firm Illuminata, told
internetnews.com. “But this move does speak to just how far the ambitions for Itanium have fallen
within both the market as a whole and within HP.”
HP is the last major OEM to sell Itanium workstations. When the original
chip design was introduced in 2000, HP along with IBM and Dell all pledged
support for the processor and promised to include it in their workstation
products. Dell dropped their production of Itanium workstations in 2002 —
IBM shortly afterward.
Even Intel itself has not been overly enthusiastic about its Itanium
sales. During this month’s Intel Developer’s Forum, Abhi Talwalkar, Intel’s
newly appointed general manager of the chipmaker’s enterprise platform
group, expressed
concerns that its sales estimates may have been too “aggressive” than
first realized.
Intel spokesperson Erica Fields quantified the HP decision to
internetnews.com by pointing out that, “the workstation market has
never been a main focus for our Itanium product family,” and that “Itanium
is targeted at the high-end RISC market and continues to make in-roads into
this space.”
HP’s decision to abandon Itanium on workstations is also expected to have
an adverse effect on hardware partners, such as SuperMicro, which
produces Itanium-based motherboards. A spokesperson for SuperMicro was not
immediately available for comment.
In a twist, HP still continues to sell its
Alpha workstations, which were instrumental for animation rendering for such
films as Shrek.
