Ask About Computers Blog

Operating Systems

You can’t say that IBM and Sun do not support operating systems other than their own on their high-end servers. They do. Linux will run on this IBM and Sun hardware, and that’s just one example.

However, the large majority of high-end IBM and Sun installations use their own operating systems. For example, in spite of the small market share of Itanium 2, “revenue for Itanium 2-based servers running Linux exceeds that of Power-based servers running Linux by a factor of 17” (p. 4).

About 95% of all high-end IBM server deployments use “IBM operating systems” (p.3). “Almost all of the SPARC-based systems being sold today run on Solaris” (p. 4).

Intel, on the other hand, is not the primary provider of OS software for Itanium 2. It’s not even a provider.

Linux makes up most installations of Itanium 2. Followed by Unix. Followed by Windows. However, even Windows has a hefty share of the Itanium 2 market.

All in all, there are currently over 10 operating systems that will run on Itanium 2. “Itanium 2-based servers are the only 64-bit servers on the market that support 10 different operating systems” (p. 3).

Itanium 2 servers even support several mainframe-class operating systems. “True mainframe-class systems are also available” (p. eight).

Applications

Thousands of applications exist for IBM mainframes and RISC machines. Thousands, too, for Sun SPARC-based servers. IBM and Sun have been around for a long time.

By contrast, Itanium has been around a much shorter period of time and also has thousands of applications. At the time of this writing, over 8,000 exist, which “more than doubles the number of applications available a year ago“.

One Stop Shop vs. Best-of-breed

Never in computing can one say that one size fits all. In spite of the potential advantages that Itanium 2 brings to the table, there may be times when a business-critical system provided by IBM or Sun is best.

Sun, for example, designs their machines to work as a system. The software and the hardware are optimized for each other. It’s sort of like Intel’s Centrino, in which hardware and software are optimized to provide performance and long battery life for notebooks, except that in Sun’s case it’s for entire systems.

The IBM and Sun approach is just another spin on the one stop shop preference. One reason why many managers prefer one stop shop is that there’s less finger-pointing when something goes wrong. You can only blame yourself, if you are the only vendor.

The Itanium 2 platform is more akin to a best-of-breed approach, wherein one selects the components one wants.

The one stop shop approach has dominated the high end for so long that it is perhaps only natural for a reaction to set in against this approach in this space. Don’t be surprised if Itanium 2 continues to grow in the coming years.

The Core 2 and Xeon 5100 families of processors belong to the Core microarchitecture. The previous generation Intel desktop chip belongs to the NetBurst microarchitecture, while previous mobile chips belong to the mobile microarchitecture of the Pentium M.