HP, Intel set up Itanium Solutions Alliance

Intel and HP last week announced the formation of the Itanium Solutions Alliance, aimed at accelerating the development of applications running on Itanium-based servers.

The software vendors that have joined are BEA, Sybase, Oracle, Microsoft, Novell, Symantec, SAS, Trend Micro and Informatica. However, a number of business-critical application vendors are missing from that list, including SAP and IBM’s software business, which develops the DB2 and Informix databases.

Hardware vendors that have joined and have committed to building Itanium servers include Fujitsu Siemens, Bull, Unisys, Hitachi and SGI. Conspicuous by its absence from the alliance is Dell, which earlier last month said it would abandon the Itanium processor . Dell first introduced its Itanium-based PowerEdge 7150 server in 2001, which it still supports. That server was followed by the PowerEdge 3250, which it now sells at its Factory Outlet site. Also absent from the list of hardware manufacturers as members is IBM, which relies on Intel Xeon processors and its own Power architecture. Sun also didn’t join the party – it relies heavily on its own UltraSparc processor and on AMD’s Opteron processor.

HP and Intel will provide alliance members with access to technical resources, training and marketing. The alliance claims there are 75-plus vendors shipping Itanium today and more than 10 operating systems supporting it. Among the operating system support is Microsoft Windows, Bull GCOS, Novell’s SuSE Enterprise Linux, Red Hat, HP-UX, OpenVMS, Non Stop Kernel and NEC’s operating system.

The alliance claims too that more than 5,000 applications have been ported to the Itanium platform and that over 70,000 Itaniums have been deployed in enterprise-class businesses.

To help alliance members develop Itanium applications and hardware, a series of Developer Days will be held and a Solutions Center Network and catalog will be set up. The first of the Developer Days will be held in Santa Clara this November.