From: Enterprise Systems Newsletter
October 8, 2002 -- Enterprise Strategies Tuesday

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TODAY'S TOP NEWS: HP Preps for PA-RISC to Itanium Transition

Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) has indicated that it will transition the
servers that today power its HP-UX Unix operating environment away
from PA-RISC and on to the 64-bit Itanium (IA-64) architecture from
Intel Corp.

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At the same time, says John Miller, director of server marketing for
business critical systems with HP, the company will nevertheless
release two additional iterations of its PA-RISC chips.  "If you look
at our roadmap, we have two more revs [of PA-RISC] -- PA-8800 and PA-
8900 -- which will take us out approximately through 2006."

The goal, Miller says, is to make the prospects of a PA-RISC-to-
Itanium migration as painless as possible for HP's existing HP-UX
customers. For example, he points out that customers who purchase new
PA-RISC 8900 systems in 2006 will enjoy end-of-lifecycle support
through 2011.

"There's a lot of time for customers to [transition]. We'll support
them for five years after they come off our price list, so assuming
they come off our price list in the 2006 time frame, we'll support
them for another five years after that, through 2011 roughly," he
acknowledges.

To assist customers who may be undecided about moving to Itanium, HP
next year will introduce a new chip -- the PA-RISC 8800 -- that
exploits server hardware that is capable of supporting either PA-RISC
or Intel's next-generation Itanium chip, code-named "Madison."

"These will enable board upgrades to our existing PA-RISC product. So
you literally swap out your PA processors and processor boards, and
you swap in the new [IA-64] processor boards. This gives our customers
the flexibility to move to [IA-64] when they want to."

Unlike the ClearPath Plus and ES7000 systems marketed by rival Unisys
Corp., however, customers will not be able to configure HP's servers
with mixed proprietary and Itanium processor architectures. Unisys,
for example, simultaneously supports its own proprietary CMOS along
with Intel's IA-32 and IA-64 chips in its ClearPath Plus mainframes.
Instead, Miller concedes, HP will offer customers the ability to run
either PA-RISC or Itanium -- but not both at the same time -- in its
high-end servers.

"Technically, there's no reason why we can't partition, because the
[IA-64] board will also support our PA-8900 processor, [which is] our
next generation processor," he observes. In practice, Miller
continues, "HP is choosing not to make that investment" primarily as a
result of customer feedback.

HP introduced a 16-way Itanium server, the RX-110, in 2001, but has
thus far concentrated largely on marketing two- and four-way Itanium
2-based systems. In contrast, rivals Unisys and NEC Corp. have
demonstrated 32-way Itanium 2-based systems. For his part, Miller
claims that HP-UX customers aren't demanding high-end Itanium 2-based
systems. Instead, he says, customers "will just want to buy a four-way
Itanium system, test it out, and make sure that it works with [their]
applications" before they commit to the IA-64 architecture on such a
large scale.

Nathan Brookwood, a principal with microprocessor consultancy
Insight64, says that HP's strategy is in large part dictated by the
limitations of the current Itanium 2 "McKinley" microprocessor, which
he says features an insufficient L3 cache for scalability in large SMP
configurations.

"Their strategy, I think, is dictated by the fact that the current
Itanium [2] is only available with 3 MB of L3 cache, and that greatly
precludes the opportunity for performance in large systems in high-end
SMP configurations," he points out. "Next year, when Madison comes
along with larger L3 caches and can begin to scale, HP will move to
the larger configurations, so it makes a lot of sense."

Starting next year, HP's Miller confirms, his company will introduce
Itanium 2 in its high-end servers, including its 64-way SuperDome
systems.

"We are planning on rolling out a Madison-based system in the higher-
end parts of our product line, [such as] our eight-way system, our 16-
way system and on up to our [64-way] SuperDome servers," he confirms.

Rob Enderle, a senior fellow with consultancy Giga Information Group,
says that HP's Itanium-to-PA-RISC transition strategy goes a long way
toward addressing some of the potential concerns that customers may
have about the future of their investments in HP-UX. In this regard,
Enderle suggests, HP is particularly concerned about losing existing
HP-UX customers to its Unix competitors, particularly Sun Microsystems
Inc.

"[HP] committed early on to delivering a version of HP-UX that was
tuned for Itanium and [which] was a feature-for-feature match [with
HP-UX on PA-RISC]," he points out. "So they're making a monumental
effort to make it as simple as possible to move between the two
architectures. Their hope is that they don't lose a lot of people in
the migration, [because] every time you do a migration like this, a
significant percentage of your customer base will take the opportunity
to explore other vendors."

Alpha Futures

HP has also committed to delivering two additional iterations of the
Alpha microprocessor it picked up when it acquired Compaq Computer
Corp. Considered by many to be among the finest microprocessors ever
developed, Alpha anchored Compaq's line of OpenVMS minicomputers and
Tru64 Unix servers. Compaq itself acquired Alpha when it purchased
Digital Equipment Corp. in early 1998.

HP is currently reselling systems based on the Alpha EV69 chips, but
will introduce Alpha EV7 and EV79 chips over the next few years
(through 2006). The company hopes to transition existing Alpha shops
to Itanium as well, but it hasn't yet introduced a hybrid hardware
architecture similar to that developed for its HP-UX servers.

"There are several iterations of Alpha that will hit the streets, so
it's definitely a very orderly transition," comments Insight64's
Brookwood. "By sometime in the 2005 or 2006 time frame, if HP's
transition plans work, most customers are going to be migrating over
[to Itanium], and it will be a very natural kind of transition where
they just won't be interested in the proprietary platforms anymore."

-- Stephen Swoyer

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