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Dell Computer released details Wednesday about its first Itanium 2-based server, a two-way PowerEdge server available with Intel's new Madison Itanium 2 processor.

Intel is expected to release Madison on Monday, but Dell unveiled its PowerEdge 3250 server Wednesday in a conference call for media and analysts. Though previously Dell had conspicuously held back from introducing an Itanium 2 server, it is now committing to the technology, spurred by the pending release of the new and improved version of the processor, said Dell product manager Darrel Ward.

The company finally decided to adopt Itanium 2 in a server because of the price/performance ratio offered by the new Madison version of Itanium 2, Ward said.

Madison is expected to come with a larger Level 3 cache (as much as 6MB) and will run at speeds of up to 1.5 GHz. It will be marketed under the Itanium 2 brand, the same official name as the 900-MHz and 1-GHz versions of the processor, code-named McKinley announced last year.

System Details

The PowerEdge 3250 is designed to be clustered in groups of eight nodes and more with Red Hat's Enterprise Linux operating system package. Customers will also be able to use Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition with the new server. The unit will come with up to 16GB of memory and up to 292GB of internal storage, Ward said.

Dell will announce pricing and availability after Intel makes its formal Madison announcement, Ward said. He declined to comment on whether Dell would release an Itanium server with more than two processors in the near future.

The McKinley version of Itanium has been slow to gain traction among enterprises despite favorable performance reviews. Hewlett-Packard and Unisys were the only major vendors to support the McKinley processor until IBM released its X450 server in April.

To take advantage of Itanium 2's performance characteristics, IT managers must port their applications to Intel's new Itanium processor instruction set, known as EPIC (explicitly parallel instruction computing). This effort has convinced many potential customers not to adopt Itanium 2 systems. Instead, they prefer to keep their most important applications in place on large Unix machines or on clustered servers based on Intel's x86 Xeon processor rather than embarking upon a significant coding project.