Wintel advances draw high-end Unix users

Computerworld - Despite performance issues surrounding Intel Corp.'s 64-bit Itanium chip, the overall lower cost promised by large Windows/Intel servers is luring some users in a tough economy to ditch their high-end Unix systems.

Unisys Corp., one of the few vendors of large Wintel servers, this week will announce that Milwaukee-based Fortis Health has completed the installation of three Unisys ES7000 enterprise servers to host several applications that had run on Unix and IBM mainframe systems. One of the servers includes an eight-way Itanium partition.

Meanwhile, Norstan Communications Inc., a Minneapolis-based integrator of communication services, has just installed a 24-way Unisys ES7000 that it will use to run its core human resources and customer relationship management applications.

All 24 processors are 32-bit, but Norstan will eventually switch to Itanium. The company is moving away from an environment in which Sybase Inc. databases run on Hewlett-Packard Co. Unix to one in which Microsoft SQL Server runs on Windows.

For each company, the lower cost of ownership associated with Wintel technology was a crucial factor.

"One of the biggest reasons we looked at it was the cost, not just of the hardware, but of the software as well," said Steve Willems, CIO at Norstan.

The company didn't say how much it was saving by moving to the Unisys servers. But it's enough to enable Norstan to build a clustered, high-availability configuration for increased reliability using the savings, Willems said.

And moving to Wintel will also allow Norstan to take quicker advantage of emerging applications, which tend to be written for Windows first, Willems added.

Fortis is moving some, but not all, of its Unix and mainframe applications for many of the same reasons.

"The largest single expense for any insurance company is IT," said Roger Jones, CIO at Fortis. "If you are as committed as Fortis is to keep health care costs down, it is very important to have the most cost-effective systems."

Intel-based enterprise servers offer not only lower costs compared with Unix and mainframe systems, but also better integration with Fortis' client-side applications, which all run on Windows, Jones said.

Fortis is migrating a key underwriting application and its data warehousing applications from Unix servers to two 16-processor ES7000s and one 32-processor ES7000 running the Windows Datacenter Server operating system. That switch is from an HP-UX and IBM AIX environment. The company is also moving its claims processing and core administrative systems from its mainframes to the Wintel platform.

Despite such moves, don't expect Wintel big iron to start widely replacing high-end RISC Unix servers anytime soon, analysts said.