64-bit computing is upon us - resellers must help customers make the move

24 February 2009

With demands on the processing power, memory and overall performance of today's servers showing no evidence of letting up, the move towards 64-bit computing is in full swing.

"However," says Greg Pothitos, HP ESS business unit manager at Tarsus Technologies, "customers aren't moving their IT environments towards proprietary 64-bit architectures. Instead they're embracing x64 architectures present in the majority of commodity Intel platforms sold in the last two to three years," he says, "something that not only makes a huge difference to the price of servers, but which also makes them easier to manage, support and upgrade."

While Pothitos says the move to x64-bit has been coming for some time now, things have been held back by software vendors' slow uptake of the new computing paradigm.

"The biggest reason to make the move to 64-bit has been the 4GB memory limitation that 32-bit servers were forced to contend with - something that was a serious pain for most database and database-driven applications," he explains.

"Software vendors quite simply had to make the move to 64-bit software if they wanted to be capable of meeting customer demands," he says.

Thankfully though, it seems like they have - today both Microsoft's server operating system and the open source community's Linux are 64-bit-capable, along with a host of applications in the database, groupware and collaborative spaces.

"Great examples of this on the Windows platform include the latest versions of Microsoft SQL, Microsoft Exchange and Oracle's databases," he says. "All of them require a great deal of main memory to be efficient and, therefore, insist on the use of a 64-bit operating system and hardware architecture."

Pothitos says the progress being made in single server environments coupled with the drive towards greater efficiency and consolidation is also driving the 64-bit paradigm into the virtualisation space.

"Since this discipline relies heavily on the ability to carve an excess of hardware resource up into smaller chunks, which in turn can be assigned to smaller virtual servers, 64-bit computing and its much larger memory capacity is ideal."

There's one final bridge to cross, however.

"Unfortunately, there is still a lack of understanding in the market around what 64-bit computing means and what its implications are.

"That's the reason we're working hard with vendors to ensure that the channel understands the benefits and changes that 64-bit brings, and how these should be communicated to the market.

"We believe that with a sound understanding of what 64-bit computing is and why it is the way of the future, the momentum behind the shift will only continue to build.

"Interested resellers should contact us for more information and assistance," he concludes.