Unisys first with Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 server

Unisys has announced another building block in the development of its recently unveiled next-generation server architecture, making the new Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 processor 9000 Series - better known as "Montecito" - the engine for new models of its ES7000/one Enterprise Server. Unisys was among the first system providers to announce support for the new Itanium 2 processor 9000 series.

"The new system using the Dual-Core Itanium 2 processors from Intel has demonstrated the highest performance of any 16-processor server and the lowest price/performance ratio of a non-clustered server in the 3 000 GB TPC-H benchmark," says Bernard Donnelly, consulting services manager at Unisys Africa. TPC-H is widely recognised as a standard measure of system performance for decision support and business intelligence (BI) in commercial business computing.

In performance figures reported by the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC), the 16-way ES7000/one achieved an improvement in price/performance of 50% compared to a competitor`s similarly performing platform running the previous generation of Intel Itanium 2 processors. Both systems achieved just over 30 000 queries per hour. It cost $37.83 per query, per hour to achieve it on the Unisys system and $75.16 on the other system.

"It means that our servers are scalable, optimise IT asset utilisation and reduce the total cost of ownership," says Donnelly.

"Combining the power of the Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 platform with Unisys expertise in mission-critical enterprise computing, the new ES7000/one provides an attractive alternative to proprietary Unix and RISC systems, as well as an excellent engine for high-performance transaction applications and sophisticated BI deployments," says Kirk Skaugen, VP of the Digital Enterprise Group at Intel.

The Unisys ES7000/one is the first server to permit configuration of a single platform for both Intel Itanium 2 and Intel Xeon processors, enabling customers to standardise and consolidate management and maintenance requirements while reducing their cost of ownership. Unisys ES7000 servers provide an enterprise computing environment, based on open standards, which is optimal for running Windows and Linux applications.

Using the Unisys 3D Visible Enterprise (3D-VE) approach, Unisys complements the powerful ES7000/one servers with integrated software tools and a rich suite of consulting, implementation and management services for optimising real-time infrastructures, consolidating IT, and enabling application environments to benefit from service-oriented architecture (SOA) and open source software.

Unisys anticipates that processor platforms based on the Itanium 2 micro architecture will play a key role, along with the Intel Xeon platform, in Unisys`s recently announced next-generation server architecture. Intended as the common platform for all Unisys enterprise servers, including the ES7000 and ClearPath families, the architecture will be the first in the market capable of running Microsoft Windows, Linux and Unisys OS2200 and MCP operating environments simultaneously on the same computer system in a single virtualised partition.