HP takes one in the servers

Well, it looks the enterprise slammed on the server spending brakes a lot quicker and a lot harder than smaller outfits this fall. HP released its fourth quarter earnings yesterday, and its Enterprise Storage and Servers group took a serious hit, with sales down 16.6 per cent to $4.22bn in the quarter ended October 31. The …

[Anonymous Coward]

Expect HP's BCS to crater in 1Q

Tukwila was supposed to be out in 4Q 2008 and wont make it into systems before July 2010.

Even then the only compelling value is twice the cores per floor tile. The performance per core is the same and its a complete fork lift replacement. I have no idea who would want this "upgrade" when software is priced per core not socket.

Last weeks memory price reduction by IBM will also help kill/stall any Itanium sales in 1Q as HP tries to figure out how to compete with their partitioning technology and "not for production" integrity virtual machine technology.

Ingomar

[Macka]

Re: Expect HP's BCS to crater in 1Q

This is hurting HP so bad. They must've lost many hundreds of millions in sales due to the late shipment of Tukwilla, including many large customers who will not return. And don't forget that Tukwilla will also have to compete head on with the 8-core Nehalem-EX, bundled with Itanium-like RAS features such as Machine Check Architecture Recovery. I see no long term future to this architecture any more. Intel will have to ship it and HP build systems around it to meet existing contractual arrangements, but how long can they seriously pretend this is a viable business if demand continues to drop off like this. Their only hope is to continue to converge the Integrity Itanium line of systems with their Proliant and Blade products to reduce the investment needed to bring Itanium systems to market. But this also weakens Itanium's value proposition if a Nehalem-EX system is identical to a Tukwilla system except for the cpu; but trashes Tukwilla on performance at a lower price point. Tukwilla's only appeal then is to incumbent HP-UX, OpenVMS and NonStop customers who don't wish to change their software platform. It certainly won't appeal to new customers, unless the customer is clueless and the salesman is very artful.

[Anonymous Coward]

Itanium is dead, big UNIX is dying

Itanium is a dead chip walking. Unisys has effectively bailed on Itanium. SGI, with its Altix-UV, has bailed on Itanium. NEC is bailing. Itanium has become an HP-only chip. Microsoft Windows and Linux have effectively bailed on Itanium, making it an HP OS only chip.

I think HP has to port OpenVMS and NonStop Kernel to x86, and migrate the NonStop architecture to x86. While OVMS customers are probably migrating to Linux/x86 over time, HP will lose installed NonStop business to the IBM mainframe if it does not do something.

However, the other factor here in addition to tanium and HP-UX fast becoming irrelevant, is the Oracle-Sun debacle making SPARC/Solaris irrelevant. Will RISC/UNIX become an IBM-only platform? Another mainframe or AS/400?

I think Oracle should get really serious about Solaris on Nehalem-EX. A solid, "big-iron" x86 chip needs a solid, "big-iron" operating system. There is a market vacuum being created by the collapse of the RISC/IA-64 UNIX market.

[Anonymous Coward]

Matty Ninja? Comments?

"The Business Critical Systems division (including Integrity and NonStop systems based on Itanium processors as well as prior HP-9000, AlphaServer, and NonStop upgrades, where available) took it on the chin with only $631m in sales, down 32.5 per cent."

Please explain that?

You told us some months ago that HP was not desperate about Tukwila.

30% decline each quarter this year and a legion of customer running to IBM POWER.

Tell us when HP will get desperate, please...

Cheers!

[Anonymous Coward]

Paging Matt Bryant #3

Where is he???