Just got my new Itanium 2 server in from HP last week. Of course, it is not being used and there is no operating system even loaded on it. Right now it is just collecting dust in the server room.
I ordered a small, dual-processor, 2 gigs of ram, raid pci card (etc...) box to run Red Hat Advanced Server 3. It is pretty much to evalutate running GNU/Linux with our current applications on Itanium rather than RISC. Good enough.
So, I find out a week after I order it that HP is offering Opterons for a lot less. A HP guy came in and told the Unix Administrator that the Itanium 2 is "less proprietary" than the Opteron and that the Opteron is not as good as the might Itanium2. Okay, I figure, we ordered the Itanium 2, I will let this slide knowing that all sales people are pretty much full of shit. By the way, I heard from someone inside of HP that the Opteron announcement was a bit of a mistake.
We get the box in - no Red Hat box, PCI in a box, and missing a couple of parts. Yea! We call HP and find out that they are going to send in an "Installer" to set up the box. It has been about 4 working days and we are yet to hear from the "Installer" after leaving multiple messages.
What crap. And I know that HP is really trying to get more servers in here. Guess what - it is not going to happen. IBM has been much more attentive and we already purchase Thinkpads in the hundreds. Right now we are running our critical systems on HP-UX/PA-RISC and they are going to slowly fade out. HP-UX has been great but it seems like it is in limbo with updates, and Linux is not only getting better every week but it is a hell of a lot more easy to use for developers and users.
So, I have a new system sitting just collecting dust. No word from HP yet and I alot of people that need some processes waiting to be moved to that machine.