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Computerworld - A year ago, users of Microsoft Corp.'s high-end Windows Server Datacenter Edition might well have felt that they had ventured down a lonely path.
But announcements made last week by Unisys Corp., a prominent hardware partner in the Datacenter program, indicate that Microsoft is gradually making progress in its quest to attract enterprise customers to its high-end systems -- even to the point that some of the earliest adopters are testing 64-bit Itanium hardware to squeeze out better performance.
Unisys last week unveiled an upgrade to its ES7000 line and spotlighted its own research that showed the high availability that its servers have demonstrated running the Datacenter Edition of Windows. For two years, the company electronically collected data from 68 nonclustered servers at customer sites in North America, said Mark Feverston, vice president of enterprise server marketing.
The Blue Bell, Pa.-based hardware maker also claims that there are about 1,900 ES7000/Datacenter servers at customer sites. Sales of ES7000s were up 85% in the first quarter of 2004 compared with the same period in 2003, with about half running the Windows Datacenter Edition and half running the Enterprise Edition, according to Feverston.
"You can sleep at night knowing the stuff is going to be reliable," said Jeremy Lehman, a senior vice president in charge of the technology group at New York-based Thomson Financial, a customer since last October. "The beauty of Unisys is that their whole culture is about big systems that can't go down."
But the early editions of ES7000s running Datacenter could be pushed to their limits, as First American Title Insurance Co. discovered. The Santa Ana, Calif.-based insurer found its ES7000s "running out of gas" during peak times, especially as West Coast employees logged on and joined colleagues nationwide in accessing the company's mission-critical title and escrow system, said CIO Larry Godec. About 11,000 users rely on the homegrown First American Software Technology (FAST) Transaction System.

First American CIO Larry Godec

"We really needed more horsepower," Godec noted.
The Contest Begins
Godec said he was anxious to try out Intel Corp.'s 64-bit Itanium chips with the FAST application and 64-bit SQL Server because of the performance gains he thought First American could get. Last December, First American benchmarked a 32-way Hewlett-Packard Co. Superdome running 64-bit Itanium chips against three different ES7000s: a 32-way box with 900-MHz Intel Xeon processors, a 32-way box with 2.8-GHz Xeon processors and a 1.5-GHz 16-way Itanium box.
"If Unisys had a 32-way box [running 64-bit Itanium] and performed better than the HP box and