Beta user gives Sun Niagara the nod over Itanium

Colm MacCarthaigh, an administrator for HEA Net, which oversees computer networks for universities in Ireland, has tried both servers running Intel's Itanium and Sun's eight-core Niagara chip.

And he says the Niagara wins hands down. Granted, Sun was trotting him around as Exhibit A at JavaOne in San Francisco, but the results of his performance tests are fairly interesting:

--The Sun T2000 server, which contains a single Niagara, with 16GB of memory could handle a maximum of around 80,000 concurrent users. A server with two Itaniums and 30GB of memory could handle about 40,000 users, he said. The T2000 could handle around 22,000 requests per second compared to the 4,000 requests per second of the Itanium. (Your mileage could differ.).

The Niagara servers only consumed about 220 watts while the Itanium sucked up 400 watts. "We were kind of surprised about the power consumption" on the T2000, he said. "I thought maybe my power meter wasn't working."

But it wasn't all upbeat for sun. MacCarthaigh said that Linux ran better than Solaris on the machine. A Sun representative blurted out that the company will soon announce an allegiance with a Linux provider.