The End of the Proprietary Era

By the end of the first quarter of 2006, approximately 99,000 Itanium-based systems had already been deployed around the world, in configurations ranging from small 2-way servers to massive systems with up to 512 processors. Customers are reporting a high level of satisfaction4 and systems based on the new Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 processor can be expected to provide another major boost in adoption rates. These servers deliver twice the performance of previous systems, while consuming up to 20 percent less energy and providing expanded enterprise capabilities that help businesses achieve even higher levels of performance, flexibility, and availability.

It has taken time for application support to reach critical mass for Itanium-based systems, but that time has clearly arrived. Software availability has more than doubled in the past 12 months to more than 8,000 optimised applications and tools. In addition, new binary translation technologies will soon enable Sun Solaris-based applications, and many others, to run without change and with near-native performance on Itanium- based systems. This breakthrough capability will greatly reduce the cost and complexity of migration, enabling more businesses to take advantage of the flexibility and value of Itanium-based solutions.

Businesses around the world are finding that Itanium-based servers enable them to substantially reduce their total costs, while gaining the flexibility to choose from 10 operating systems, dozens of hardware vendors, thousands of applications, and a large community of independent solution providers. For organizations that are tired of the high cost and limitations of proprietary architectures, Itanium-based solutions offer a new model for usiness-critical computing—one that is rapidly gaining traction in the worldwide marketplace.