News
Unisys Has Sold 420 Wintel Mainframes
- By Scott Bekker
- August 08, 2001
Unisys Corp. has sold 420 of its big Wintel mainframes, the 32-processor capable ES7000, a senior company official said Wednesday.
Unisys is shipping a growing proportion of its ES7000 systems with Microsoft Corp.'s high-end Windows 2000 Datacenter Server operating system. And although Unisys intends to begin shipping some ES7000 systems with 64-bit Intel Itanium processors this month, Unisys does not expect much demand immediately.
Pete Samson, Unisys vice president and general manager of technology sales development, says Unisys has sold 420 of its Cellular Multi-Processing servers so far. That's about 100 units since March, when the company had moved 320 of the servers.
The server platform was designed with input from Redmond for Microsoft's Windows 2000 Datacenter Server operating system, which also supports 32 processors and 64 GB of RAM. The ES7000 is the only Windows-focused server on the market that supports more than eight- processor SMP.
"We're shipping a little over 40 percent with Datacenter Server," Samson says. "Windows 2000 Advanced Server is still outstripping Datacenter, but purely because of [the lack of] availability of scalable apps."
"I don't think anyone's really buying the ES7000 unless they have a strategic need to go to Datacenter," Samson says. Only nine distinct applications from seven vendors are currently certified through Microsoft's program to run on Windows 2000 Datacenter Server. That number doesn't include SAP, which has been extensively benchmarked by Unisys to demonstrate scalability. SAP has its own certification program.
Meanwhile, Unisys will begin shipping ES7000 systems with 64-bit Itanium processors this month. The ES7000 can run with either 32-bit or 64-bit Intel processors. Both 32-bit and 64-bit processors can be run simultaneously on different partitions within one ES7000.
"Our expectations are that we won't see [64-bit systems] as a significant part of our volume until next year," Samson says. Unisys will ship the Itanium processors with Microsoft's supported beta 64-bit operating system, Samson says.
About the Author
Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.