By Timothy Prickett Morgan
When Hewlett-Packard Co announced yesterday that it had got its foot in the data center door at online bookseller Amazon.com, it was Compaq’s AlphaServer that got the boot. According to Patrick Rogers, who heads up worldwide marketing for the HP 9000 line, Amazon.com’s back end applications, which run on Oracle data bases, have up until now run on Compaq’s AlphaServers on top of its Tru64 Unix variant. Compaq has, of course, made much hay out of this fact. Additionally, AlphaServers support the web front- ends at Amazon.com, too, he says. He says that Amazon.com has hundreds of AlphaServers running these two workloads, and that many of them are, not surprisingly, the latest 10-way GS140 SMP servers. Looking forward to the Christmas buying season a few months ago, Amazon.com reckoned that it would need to triple the processing capacity of its back-end servers to meet the holiday crush.
The company eliminated Compaq’s Alphas and IBM’s RS/6000s from the bidding early because at the time neither of them offered the scalability that HP’s V2500s and Sun’s Starfires did. After a 30- day technical bake-off that put Amazon.com’s actual Oracle workload on the HP and Sun kit – and which saw HP’s CEO Carly Fiorina and Sun CEO Scott McNealy making several trips up to pitch the sale to Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos – the bookseller came to the conclusion that HP’s V2500s offered better response time and scalability than the Sun Starfires. As it now stands, HP has shipped several dozen 32-way V2500s into Amazon.com, and they were not paid for with venture funding or revenue sharing financing, but cold hard cash. Rogers says that the V2500s were better than the Sun Starfires because the PA- 8500s offer much better uniprocessor performance than the UltraSparc-IIs, which is more important running the single- threaded, Oracle-based Amazon.com workload and which contributed to much-improved response times compared to the AlphaServers as well as Sun’s Starfires. The Compaq Alphas, he says, were not contenders because the backplane in the machines is four years old and despite the impressive power of the Alpha chip cannot deliver the bandwidth to balance against that CPU power and therefore makes Alphas less attractive than the V2500s. Rumor has it that the web front ends at Amazon.com are now up for grabs, and odds are that IBM, Sun and HP will be fighting over that soon.
Incidentally, according to analysts at Salomon Smith Barney, Fiorina says that HP won its recent deals at Amazon.com, America Online, United Airlines, Wal-Mart, Cisco Systems and Home Depot against both IBM and Sun by old-fashioned salesmanship, not by giving away hardware as analysts at Merrill Lynch suggested when we spoke to them yesterday. HP told Merrill Lynch that Sun’s discounts were even greater than those ultimately offered by HP and that the deal was clinched in part based on HP’s ServiceGuard high availability services. Expect more bickering as HP goes after more deals and Sun defends itself against HP’s forays.
