64-bit Linux: Ready for prime time?
With the arrival of the AMD Opteron and Intel Itanium, commodity servers built on these processors have joined proprietary RISC systems from IBM, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, and others in the 64-bit landscape. With prices starting at just over $2,000, Opteron and Itanium systems — running Linux or Windows — are already carving out a niche in high-performance computing clusters, where they are used to run compute-intensive scientific- and financial-modeling applications. Eventually they will replace their 32-bit forebears in corporate datacenters, and clusters of them may even challenge 64-bit Unix systems costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.
How long this will take depends on software vendors, who must rewrite their applications for the new 64-bit CPUs. Many operating systems are already available for Opteron and Itanium. In addition to Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 2.1, which supports Itanium, and SuSE Linux Enterprise Server, which supports both Itanium and Opteron, there is an Itanium version of Windows Server 2003, and Itanium and Opteron versions of Turbolinux Enterprise Server 8. Databases such as IBM DB2 and Oracle 9i, and application servers from IBM, Oracle, and BEA Systems should begin to be available this year. But enterprise app vendors, with the exception of SAP, have been slow to commit to a road map of support.
