use for a Itaminium

[john3850]

The company that my wife works for is being sold in a few months.

The new company said to dump the pc and old network stuff.

There is a large HP Itaminium 2 tower with 20 network cabled
boxes that almost look like hd coming out of it.
Box with spare mb also

Would this Itaminium 2 be usefull for any thing.

 

[kamikazekyle]

Never actaully USED an Itanium, but going by the wiki and my own research in the past: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium Overall, pretty much anything you can do with a dedicated server you can do with an Itanium box.

Major server OSes all have an Itanium compatible version (Linux, Windows, etc). Finding software compiled for an Itanium would be a bit more difficult, however, and according to the wiki the insruction set simulators are for SPARC. I don't *think* Itanium is compatible with x86 or x64 code without a middleman doing translation/emulation.

I'd probably take the server, slap on a hypervisor of some sort, and run some virtualized systems. HP does/did make a hypervisor for Itanium. Linux, overall, might be your best bet for repositories and probable continuation of development past commercial EOL.

Get it while it's hot since most major commerical vendors (including Microsoft) are dropping support for Itanium.

 

[john3850]

thanks for the reply