The Itanium processor, part 1: Warming up

Re:The Itanium processor, part 1: Warming up by rwmj on Monday July 27, 2015 @01:20PM (#9956592)

You can buy old Itanium hardware super-cheap now on eBay. I got an HP Integrity RX2620 for £58 which included tax and delivery.

As hardware goes it's .. interesting. It's fast. But it uses huge amounts of power and requires massive cooling (if you disable any of the 4 or 5 fans in my 2U machine, it overheats in 5 minutes). It has early EFI which should be quite familiar if you've used UEFI on the command line. And it has excellent iLO / remote / serial support so it's great practice for learning about enterprise ops.

It's getting hard to find software that runs on it. The last Debian (Wheezy) runs, but current Debian has dropped ia64 support. RHEL dropped support years ago. You'll find there are lots of strange bugs because people no longer test their software on this platform.

https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2015/05/03/raise-the-itanic-part-...

https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2014/09/08/raise-the-itanic/#cont...

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Re:The Itanium processor, part 1: Warming up by bluedino on Monday July 27, 2015 @01:57PM (#9956840)

>> You can buy old Itanium hardware super-cheap now on eBay. I got an HP Integrity RX2620 for £58

My last gig had an Itanium running some HP-UX software that had been cobbled together over the past 20 (?) years. eBay provides cheap parts to upgrade the server as well as put together a machine for the failover datacenter.

CPU and RAM were both cheap. However, you're stuck with commodity SCSI drives which are still expensive for the largest sizes. 300GB drives, NIB and matching are like $150 USD a piece.

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Re:The Itanium processor, part 1: Warming up by trentnelson on Monday July 27, 2015 @03:23PM (#9957395)

Heh, HP donated two rx5670s to Snakebite, you can see the one I managed to rack here: https://youtu.be/X_IfRHgJubM?t=60.

Huge power hogs. Even more than my ES40.

The iLO stuff is phenomenal. As is all the hot-swap support ... DIMMs, CPUs, fans, you name it. This goes back to 2003, too.

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Re:The Itanium processor, part 1: Warming up by macintux on Monday July 27, 2015 @05:28PM (#9958134)

This brings back memories. At Progeny Linux Systems we helped HP get Debian packages working properly on ia64.

We had one of HP's first generation Itanium servers to test on, and man, was that SLOW.

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Re:The Itanium processor, part 1: Warming up by zokier on Monday July 27, 2015 @01:26PM (#9956621)

> if you disable any of the 4 or 5 fans in my 2U machine, it overheats in 5 minutes

Huh, I would have expected better redundancy given how expensive the hardware must have been at the time.

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Re:The Itanium processor, part 1: Warming up by rwmj on Monday July 27, 2015 @01:33PM (#9956667)

I agree it's strange. If you pull any fan, the machine hard shuts down a few minutes later (it even warns you of this in a note printed inside the case). Presumably if a fan fails and you don't manage to get to it in a few minutes, then you're out of luck. The only good thing is that it is possible to hot-swap a fan in a few seconds if the fan is failing-but-not-failed (if that ever happens - it seems unlikely).

Edit: Would love to know what the list price of my machine was back in 2006. Probably thousands ...

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Re:The Itanium processor, part 1: Warming up by mikequinlan on Monday July 27, 2015 @04:04PM (#9957672)

Google turns up http://www.openpa.net/systems/hp_rx2600_rx2620.html with prices for the rx2600 which was released a few years before the rx2620.

"Time of introduction: 2002-2003 (rx2600)/December 2004 (rx2620) with prices at the time starting at $7,300 (entry rx2600), $16,000 (average rx2600) to $33,000 (large rx2600)."

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Re:The Itanium processor, part 1: Warming up by jacquesm on Monday July 27, 2015 @02:38PM (#9957121)

> Probably thousands ...

Try 15K euros!

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Re:The Itanium processor, part 1: Warming up by rwmj on Monday July 27, 2015 @02:42PM (#9957153)

Ouch! Thanks. I wonder if anyone ever paid list price for these? AIUI many were given away for educational use and the like.

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Re:The Itanium processor, part 1: Warming up by jacquesm on Tuesday July 28, 2015 @03:28AM (#9960006)

I never got further than a quote. The most exotic hardware I actually bought were a DEC Alpha and a whole bunch of SGI gear (at considerable discount).

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