On Sun Microsystems Inc.

About Itanium and HP-UX

Oracle OpenWorld had several Keynote Speakers from October 22 to October 25. Mark Hurd (Hewlett-Packard CEO) was one of them. I always like to listen to what CEOs have to say, so I have clicked on the video, and was very surprised for what I saw there... 

From the minute 21 to the minute 26 is located the most important part. He tells a story about hundreds of data marts that HP have internally that he will consolidate in one big Data Warehouse. To achieve this, he will use ProLiant and C-Class blades running Linux... no mention of Itanium or HP-UX whatsoever.

So I did a small research and found that HP runs SAP for its supply chain management. In fact, for year 2004 Q3 poor results they blame SAP for its performance.

That lead me to think that Mark Hurd would probably try to use the best price/performance system internally. Since he runs SAP, I went to the SAP benchmark site and found an interesting data, four Opteron 885 processors deliver 8520 SAPs and four Itanium Dual-Core 9050 (the most expensive version) deliver 7730 SAPs. What's more important is that both benchmarks use the same OS and DataBase (different binaries, of course), so the performance difference is only due to the processors and the system bus itself.

So now I understand why mister Hurd preferred to use ProLiant and C-class (Xeon or Opteron based, no Itanuim option whatsoever) with Linux (it seems that HP-UX licenses are too expensive even for him).

See you next post.

Posted at 10:27AM Nov 17, 2006 by maitas in Sun  |  Comments[3]