The server wars are on, and the current battle seems to be centered around Intel’s Itanium platform with combatants taking either a pro-Itanium or anti-Itanium stance.

Just a few weeks after Dell said it would quit selling Itanium-based systems, Sun Microsystems has launched a new campaign to woo server customers away from the Intel server platform.

Telling customers to “Get off the ‘Itanic’”, Sun is offering HP-based Itanium users a 12 percent discount if they move to certain Sun servers instead, those based on Opteron, AMD’s 64-bit server platform.

The aggressive Sun message tells users “a dying OS on a failed chipset is not a smart investment,” and goes on to push the systems offered by Sun, boasting about performance, power consumption, price, physical footprint, and other advantages the company says its systems have over other servers.

The campaign comes just a week after several industry giants announced plans to team up to boost availability of Itanium systems.  The initiative includes Bull, Fujitsu, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Hitachi, HP, Intel, NEC, SGI and Unisys.

And a little over two weeks ago Dell confirmed it would quit selling Itanium-based solutions by the end of the year. Dell said it planned to stay with Intel's x86-based server platform, Xeon.

By: DocMemory
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