Servers with Intel's 64bit Itanium processors have started to ship, and will eventually be used for many corporate applications. For now, however, Itanium servers are still in a development phase and it is difficult to gauge the real-world performance of this new platform.
IT Week Labs has found that trying to test Itanium-based servers is like trying to test a car without tyres. The problem is there are few enterprise-class applications ready to run on this platform and no cross-platform benchmarking tools. Our test subject, Dell PowerEdge 7150, arrived with four 64bit Itanium chips and is ready to run 64bit Linux or the preview version of 64bit Windows.
Over the next few weeks, we are hoping to add a Hewlett-Packard server to the mix so we can get a peek at the new version of HP-UX that was designed to run on the IA-64 platform. Considering that HP played a major role in the development of Itanium, it will be interesting to see if the firm has a head start compared with Windows and Linux platforms.
Although it would be possible to run traditional server applications to assess 64bit Itanium Web server and file server performance, these tests would show no improvement compared with IA-32 platforms because they will not take advantage of Itanium's floating-point performance capabilities or its ability to address large memory sets.
Two security-based benchmarks are now available for testing: RSA Security's Secure Operations Benchmark for Windows XP 64bit Edition tests an Itanium server's ability to decrypt secure signatures, revealing how many decryptions per second the server is capable of processing. And on the Linux side, Coradiant Research has developed the SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) Solution-level Security Benchmark, which is designed to test the secure transaction capacity of a server in a real-world, multiclient environment. However, these two benchmarks are platform-specific, so it is impossible to use these tests to get make meaningful comparisons of 64bit Linux and Windows, never mind HP-UX.
The other benchmark tests that are available are primarily hardware tests that can show off Itanium's potential but not its finesse with applications. The Stream test measures sustainable memory bandwidth in megabytes per second, and the corresponding computation rate for simple vector kernels  see the first Web address below.
Another hardware benchmark that could do Itanium justice is Linpack 1000, a floating-point-intensive benchmark that uses a collection of Fortran subroutines to analyse and solve linear equations and similar problems  see the second Web address.
