Features - Storage Innovations:

SYBASE AND HP TAKE ADAPTIVE SERVER ENTERPRISE TO 64-BIT

As competition stiffens in the Itanium 2 server market, Hewlett-Packard is taking solid steps to differentiate its product and carve out its place. The industry giant announced recently that it will collaborate on the delopment of a new version of Sybase's Adapter Server Enterprise software for HP's Itanium 2-optimized database, which should be completed at some point next year. The database will run on both Red Hat Linux and HP's own HP-UX Unix.

The Itanium 2 chip has turned a lot of head recently, and is viewed by many in the industry as a drastic improvement over Intel's Itanium 1, which did not receive the rapid adoption of Itanium 2. The 64-bit processor is ideal for heavy-compute applications that require the ability to store large amounts of data in a server's memory. According to Sybase, the interest in a 64-bit version of its Adaptive Server Enterprise is growing out of the financial industry and the high-tech manufacturing industry.

There is also some talk at Sybase about whether or not to adapt its database server for the 64-bit Opteron processor from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). But so far, no concrete plans have been announced.