A year ago, users of Microsoft Corp.'s high-end Windows Server Datacenter Edition might well have felt that they had ventured down a lonely path.
But announcements made last week by Unisys Corp., a prominent hardware partner in the Datacenter program, indicate that Microsoft is gradually making progress in its quest to attract enterprise customers to its high-end systems -- even to the point that some of the earliest adopters are testing 64-bit Itanium hardware to squeeze out better performance.
Unisys last week unveiled an upgrade to its ES7000 line and spotlighted its own research that showed the high availability that its servers have demonstrated running the Datacenter Edition of Windows. For two years, the company electronically collected data from 68 nonclustered servers at customer sites in North America, said Mark Feverston, vice president of enterprise server marketing.
The Blue Bell, Pa.-based hardware maker also claims that there are about 1,900 ES7000/Datacenter servers at customer sites. Sales of ES7000s were up 85% in the first quarter of 2004 compared with the same period in 2003, with about half running the Windows Datacenter Edition and half running the Enterprise Edition, according to Feverston.
"You can sleep at night knowing the stuff is going to be reliable," said Jeremy Lehman, a senior vice president in charge of the technology group at New York-based Thomson Financial, a customer since last October. "The beauty of Unisys is that their whole culture is about big systems that can't go down."
But the early editions of ES7000s running Datacenter could be pushed to their limits, as First American Title Insurance Co. discovered. The Santa Ana, Calif.-based insurer found its ES7000s "running out of gas" during peak times, especially as West Coast employees logged on and joined colleagues nationwide in accessing the company's mission-critical title and escrow system, said CIO Larry Godec. About 11,000 users rely on the homegrown First American Software Technology (FAST) Transaction System.
The Contest Begins
Godec said he was anxious to try out Intel Corp.'s 64-bit Itanium chips with the FAST application and 64-bit SQL Server because of the performance gains he thought First American could get. Last December, First American benchmarked a 32-way Hewlett-Packard Co. Superdome running 64-bit Itanium chips against three different ES7000s: a 32-way box with 900-MHz Intel Xeon processors, a 32-way box with 2.8-GHz Xeon processors and a 1.5-GHz 16-way Itanium box.
"If Unisys had a 32-way box [running 64-bit Itanium] and performed better than the HP box and was shown to be stable, it would have come down to price," Godec said. "It's not that we were trying to throw Unisys out for any reason."
To no one's surprise, the 32-way HP box running Itanium "blew away" the 16-way Unisys box equipped with Itanium, Godec said. So First American soon began moving to new HP hardware and Windows Server 2003 Datacenter.
The switch didn't happen without a few bumps, including error handling problems with the Itanium chip, Godec noted. But now that all the kinks have been worked out, First American can focus on enhancing its FAST application rather than fretting over performance, he said. The company repurposed its ES7000s for its data warehouse.
Another early ES7000/Datacenter adopter, an international cosmetics manufacturer, chose a different approach. The company wants out of the Datacenter program entirely, according to the database manager, who asked that he and his company not be identified.
He said the Datacenter reseller program has been too restrictive. Because the cosmetics company opted for a storage product that wasn't one of the certified configurations for the ES7000/Datacenter system, it found it would have to pay to get its configuration certified, according to the database manager. He said he prefers more choice for external products.
The cosmetics company has no plans to abandon Windows, and Unisys remains in the running. But it's testing its massive SQL Server 2000 databases on the 64-bit Enterprise Edition of Windows Server 2003 running on Unisys, HP and IBM hardware with 64-bit Itanium processors, according to the database manager. He said his research indicates that 1.5-GHz Itanium processors will be faster than 3-GHz 32-bit processors.
The cosmetics company is testing a cluster of two eight-way 64-bit servers running SQL Server, rather than the two 16-way 32-bit ES7000s it currently uses. The database manager added that if all works well, he hopes to be able to replace the two ES7000s leased at a total cost of $800,000 with six smaller servers leased for $280,000 -- and improve performance to boot. An end-to-end process that took four hours to complete in the 32-bit world is now done in 40 minutes with 64-bit chips, he said.
Lehman said he has "played that game" of trying to come up with less expensive configurations that can boost performance. But he said configuring and managing the boxes requires significant IT effort, and he prefers that his developers focus on building new products for Thomson.
Tom Bittman, an analyst at Gartner Inc., said that although Windows Datacenter sales are growing, it's still at a slow rate. In contrast, Enterprise Edition is a much higher-volume product with a faster rate of growth, he said.
Yet it's no longer difficult to find users who are happy to talk about their current Unisys/Datacenter systems. Gary Clark, director of corporate IT services at La-Z-Boy Inc. in Monroe, Mich., said his company installed its first ES7000 in December 2000 for server consolidation purposes and has since added two more boxes to run its new PeopleSoft ERP system.
"Right now, without question, we're sticking with the Datacenter program," said Clark. "I don't want to deal with multiple vendors relative to how I get my support for my mixed environment. ... It's a premium price, but we've found time and again that it has come through for us."
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