Compaq last week became the second major vendor in a month to scrap the 32-way servers it was selling preloaded with the DataCenter version of Microsoft's Windows 2000. Hewlett-Packard had canceled its plans in April.

The decisions, however, may be more a testament to IT executives' lack of interest in 32-way Intel-based servers and not a comment of Microsoft's DataCenter software.

DataCenter is the high-end Windows 2000 server launched late last year that requires hardware manufacturers to test and certify the operating system running on their product.

DataCenter is Microsoft's answer to Unix servers that run core applications for large firms. It is intended for large-scale online transaction processing, databases, data warehousing and enterprise resource management software.

The 32-way configuration is the maximum number of supported processors for DataCenter. On the low end, the server supports eight processors.

But the 32-way model is selling poorly, and Compaq, which helped Microsoft develop the DataCenter program, follows HP as companies that have ceased shipping 32-way DataCenter servers.

"The 32-way servers are way ahead of where the market wants to be," says Rob Enderle, an analyst with Giga Information Group. "Customers want to buy these types of servers from the manufacturers, not an OEM."

Compaq licenses its server, sold under the name ProLiant ML770, from Unisys, as do other 32-way vendors including Dell, Hitachi and ICL.

Unisys officials say they have sold 350 of the 32-way servers, and that 50% of them have been loaded with DataCenter.

"Compaq is more comfortable with the scale out option of adding more servers, where we are focused on the scale up capabilities of the 32-way system," says Pete Samson, vice president and general manager for technology sales development for Unisys. "We were counting on Compaq to provide that scale-up architecture to their customers, but now they have taken away that option."

Compaq said it will focus sales efforts on DataCenter running on its eight-way ProLiant 8500 hardware, which accounts for nearly 95% of its DataCenter sales. It will continue to work with Unisys to provide support to existing ML770 customers after the product stops shipping on May 31.

Compaq said it's developing its own 32-way server based on Intel's forthcoming McKinley IA-64 chip. Co-developed with HP, McKinley is a 1 GHz-plus processor that can run numerous operating systems.

"This was a decision based on economics," says Timothy Golden, Compaq's director of marketing for enterprise servers. "We can meet the needs of 95% of our customers with the eight-way platform."

"We are sorry to hear that Compaq and Unisys won't be working together on the 32-way platform," says Bob O'Brien, group product manager for the server group at Microsoft. "Compaq made primarily what was a business decision."

» posted by ITworld staff

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