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January 17, 2000

Inside Intel:
Back-End Push Heats Up

By Paul McDougall with additional reporting by Martin J. Garvey

Illustration by Doug Ross

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here's no question that Intel processors are the building blocks for the Internet economy at the desktop level, but the same can't be said when it comes to large enterprise servers. According to Intel, its CPUs account for just 13% of chips in such servers nationwide.

Intel's failure to significantly penetrate the back end of the enterprise with its Pentium and Pentium Xeon chips stems largely from the fact that the Wintel architecture hasn't been seen as sufficiently reliable or scalable for hosting large amounts of vital data. Only recently have robust, eight-processor, industry-standard Pentium Xeon systems come on the market, and the ability to cluster four Wintel systems awaits the shipment of the Windows 2000 Data Center edition.

Yet things are looking up. Intel's 64-bit Itanium chip, the first of a line known as IA-64, should ship this summer. It offers technologies to enhance the platform for back-end operations, such as kicking bad data back to the operating system to prevent system locks. "It asks the system to terminate that process and let everything else run," says Stephen Smith, VP and general manager for Intel's IA-64 processor division. "We've given IA-64 features that allow us to go after the data center."

In addition, Itanium's Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (Epic) architecture permits faster throughput of secure Web pages, to make up for the fact that algorithms in the Secure Sockets Layer protocol often impose a performance hit. Intel says its tests show the chip to be 10 times faster than RISC CPUs when running security algorithms, and analysts say improvements over existing Intel technology are likely. "Epic lets Itanium scale much more linearly in multiprocessor implementations and share the load more evenly," says Rob Enderle, a VP at Giga Information Group. Sources say Itanium will debut at 800 MHz, and the follow-on McKinley, due by early 2001, will run at 1 GHz.

At the same time, many users are counting on Windows 2000 to be more stable. "The data center features and clustering will make it a lot more scalable and let us put high-availability solutions in," says Joe Cirra, assistant VP of MIS at Mellon Bank in Pittsburgh. "Our main emphasis is consolidation, building highly scalable servers we can get thousands of users on."

Manufacturers of Intel servers say they expect the one-two punch of IA-64 and Windows 2000 to make their products more competitive with high-end proprietary systems. "IBM's strategy centers on creating a Windows architecture that mirrors a mainframe environment," says Tom Bradicich, director of IBM's Netfinity Architecture Group. "We're bringing our significant experience with 64-bit technology to bear on our PC server products."

Additionally, Itanium will run more versions of Unix than previous Intel CPUs, including Monterey (a merger of Unix operating systems from IBM, SCO, and Sequent, which IBM recently acquired); Sun Microsystems' Solaris; Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX; and Linux. "Itanium will be the back-end engine for the Internet because it's the only processor that can run all major operating systems," says Sean Maloney, Intel's senior VP for worldwide sales and marketing. "In the back office, you have a large Unix market-- we have to take that seriously."

Users find this intriguing. "Windows is where we've really seen the bottlenecks in the dot.com space," says NASD's Congdon, who now uses NT on Dell servers to run more than a dozen Web sites. "But we're not wedded to Windows 2000," he says. "If there's an operating system that makes more sense, we'll absolutely consider it."

Photo by Alan Blaustein Kris Carpenter, VP for commerce at shopping portal Excite@Home, says she'd consider putting critical back-end database components, which now reside on Sun servers, onto an Itanium server running an operating system other than Windows. "With the new Intel systems, we will take a close look to see if Linux is reliable enough and enhanced enough to support large-scale operations in our 24-by-7 environment."

Observers say the push for new partners makes sense. "The apron strings to Microsoft are cut with Itanium," says Merrill Lynch analyst Osha. "Intel doesn't want this to be perceived as an expansion of Wintel." Intel CEO Barrett expects a lot of competition among operating system vendors for IA-64 mindshare. "No one's got a lock on that space," he says. "It's going to be a free-for-all for a while."

Still, Intel faces challenges. For instance, it needs to make sure there's software available "to take IA-64 wherever it can on the Internet," says VP Smith. While most major apps will be recompiled to run optimally on Itanium, Intel and its major customers have established a $250 million fund to make sure applications and middleware are available to enable critical back-end E-commerce operations.

Also, RISC vendors aren't standing still. IBM says its PowerPC 4, due in 2001, will run at 1 GHz and be aimed at the same E-commerce sites Intel is targeting. Compaq says it's "committed" to its Alpha chip, which by 2002 will support its Non-Stop Kernel/ Himalaya operating system. HP, a co-development partner on IA-64, will move forward with new RISC CPUs for three years. But HP is already delivering PA-RISC servers that will also support IA-64 chips running either HP-UX or Windows 2000, and it says the future belongs to Intel.

Unlike Compaq, HP, and IBM, Sun won't build IA-64 systems. Sun execs say the company is committed to its UltraSparc chip. This year, Sun will unveil its UltraSparc IV running at 1 GHz; a 1.5-GHz version is planned by 2002. Sun says it's not concerned about Itanium. "It has yet to prove it can live up to the promises made to the marketplace," a company spokeswoman says.

Analysts don't expect IA-64 to dominate the server market at first, but many say it could eventually become a threat to competitors. "Consider the experience Intel has in optimizing production, and they'll be able to sell this product across a range of vendors," says Merrill Lynch's Osha. "Ultimately, it could be quite devastating."