HP has notified its partners and customers of the end of the line for its AlphaServer systems. According to a document seen by the Inquirer, the last order date is planned for the 27th of October 2006, with those systems delivered by December next year. The end of an era.
It’s kinda sad to see the alpha go. Oh well, I’ll still have my pws humming along by my feet.
That really sucks.
… really sad. I had a Dual 500 mhz alpha in 1999. It was like the machine knew what I was thinking. It was so fast, that it seemed like stuff would open before I even finished clicking on it.
What’s worse is that Alpha died to pave the way for Intel’s huge flop–the Itanium.
Since the Itanium is now a mistake of the past, we’re left without Alpha,
and for what reason? Greed!
Two viable massively parallel computing systems these days:
IBM’s Power and Sun’s SPARC. Thank you HP.
can someone give me the top job at HP tech strategy – i could do a better job than those overpaid nincompoops.
I think the entire HP enterprise strategy is under a serious threat because HP pinned pretty much everything on Itanium, which turned out to be a mega failure. According to HP’s own surveys at least 50% of their PA-RISC and Alpha customers are not planning to migrate to Itanic, which means HP is destined to loose at least 50% of their high end enterprise business to competition (Sun and IBM). We all should be thanking Carly for this.
We are a site with many AlphaServers, but most of these will be moved to HP Proliant AMD based servers running Linux. HP doesn’t lose the customer in this case, but it does give us the ability to quickly and easily switch vendors in the future.
That, and the fact that it puts them in the direct firing line of Dell; basically HP is going to try to become a Dell – sorry, it isn’t going to happen; their server, desktop and workstation divisions are all losing money hand over fist.
IBM faced the reality and sold off their desktop/workstation business; SUN is economising on their designs to reduce duplication between their Opteron and SPARC business.
UItimately in a few years, HP will be a printer company with a consultancy firm on the side, then when Dell printers improve, HP will be non-existant.
Why purchase an HP product when Dell can provide the same thing at 3/4 the price? its the same crap, the only difference, its in a different box, thats it.
> Why purchase an HP product when Dell can provide the same thing at 3/4 the price? its the same crap, the only difference, its in a different box, thats it.
BTW, you can now buy x86 (AMD Opteron) gear from Sun cheaper than even Dell. Sun is now the best value in x86 servers. Both Dell and HP should be coming under quite a bit of pressure pretty soon.
Two great unix!
> We are a site with many AlphaServers, but most of these will be moved to HP Proliant AMD based servers running Linux.
Ha ha, I don’t think HP Proliant AMD system is anywhere adequate replacement for any of the high end Tru64 gear running out there. It may be OK for the very low end machines, but nowhere good enough for the applications requiring vertial scalability (DSS, OLAP, ERP, etc.). For those application you have not choice but to look elsewhere, i.e Sun or IBM.
> Ha ha, I don’t think HP Proliant AMD system is anywhere > adequate replacement for any of the high end Tru64 gear > running out there.
And what about the poor sods using VMS ? They’re now totally lumbered – they can’t just switch over to a free Unix on commodity hardware.
– This is how you EOL a product.
You actually tell people this is the Last Version of the Product. In reference to PowerBooks and PowerMacs.
We should be told, this is the Last PowerPC based Powerbooks on sale, there will be no other versions.
– The other lesson is you shouldn’t stop development of your chips until it’s replacement actually OUTPERFORMS it. HP could have saved this business.
– You shouldn’t hire Intel/Windows Kissup’s to run your Enterprise divisions.