[Info-vax] HP Users Hope Whitman Can Persuade Oracle to Change Itanium Decision

[JF Mezei]

MG wrote:

> Well, what do you think?

Dell has outsourced most of its systems designs to Asus. Asus wants mass
 market and has no expertise in "mainframes". And it likely uses the
Intel reference designs ofr x86 motherboards.

So, in terms of Dell not producing "mainframes", it is either because
the market isn't large enough for Dell's business model, or because Dell
lacks the engineers to design such systems.

The current superdomes are glorified blades with a Quickpath (CSI)
bridge between blades. Very smartly done. But this means that HP could
make equivalent X86 blades with the same blade interconnects to bridge
the memory and voila, you'd have x86 based Superdomes.

My guess is that superdomes are designed to run only HP-UX, in the same
way that NSK gets its own systems dedicated to running NSK. Hp might not
be interested in selling superdomes that run Linux since Linux doesn't
generate as much support revenus.