Product: Virtuozzo for ItaniumManufacturer: SWsoftTelephone: 800-422-3593E-mail: info@sw-soft.comURL: www.sw-soft.com

Only True 64-bit Virtual Private Servers Bring Itanium Within Reach of Software Developers, Enterprise IT Administrators, and Mass Market Hosting Service Providers

SWsoft, Inc., a leader in hosting automation and enterprise server software, today announced the general availability of a 64-bit version of Virtuozzo for Itanium, bringing mainframe-like partitioning to Intel's next generation architecture. For the first time, technical enthusiasts, software developers, IT migration planners, and scientific computing administrators, can get low-cost access to true 64-bit Virtual Private Servers (VPS), each with the exact same functionality as a dedicated Itanium server.

The benefits of Intel's Itanium architecture make it affordable to a much wider range of IT budgets; benefits include support for huge addressable memory, faster floating point number-crunching and improved parallel processor performance due to new support for the Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC) architecture. Each VPS comes with full Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees and the ability to automatically scale to the full server base on resource requirements.

"Sixty-four-bit Virtuozzo for Itanium brings the benefits of the Itanium architecture within the reach of the average buyer in hosting datacenters and enterprise IT groups," stated Serguei Beloussov, CEO for SWsoft. "People are playing around with Itanium servers to test out demand. A Hosting provider can buy a single Itanium server, create hundreds of 64-bit Virtuozzo VPS on the server, and market the 64-bit VPS to technical enthusiasts and software developers at affordable prices. IT managers can buy a couple of Itanium servers and create dozens of VPS for each internal development group, plan their 64-bit migration path and help their IT staff to gain experience with 64-bit scalability and porting issues."

"From our research into the mass market hosting sector, we have noted that dedicated hosting prices are under pressure and sub-$100 a month price points are becoming more prevalent. That said, it becomes very important to distinguish between the types of servers being offered, and clearly, these price points do not apply to Intel's new Itanium servers," said Joshua Beil, Vice President of Tier 1 Research (www.tier1Research.com). "However, Virtuozzo-based Itanium VPS can bring 64-bit Itanium dedicated-like hosting under this $100 a month price level, which can be a competitive differentiation and a new revenue stream for hosting providers, as they attract early technology adopters and customers with special 64-bit developer requirements."

The new 64-bit version of Virtuozzo makes use of Itanium's huge virtual address space and very large physical address space, key considerations for enterprises and hosting service providers that maintain large database systems and similar applications. Although the currently popular Intel 32-bit servers are available with up to 64GB of memory, the 32-bit systems can only directly access 4GB at a time and rely on complex datastructures such as page tables that reside in the kernel's limited 1GB of memory. All this makes the 32-bit servers increasingly less efficient for servers with larger physical memory systems. Itanium 64-bit servers overcome these scalability problems.

"I looked at Virtuozzo for Itanium because a few sales inquiries came in from hobbyists and systems integrators who wanted to test 64-bit applications," says George J. Georgievsky, CEO for USonyx. "I'm allocating only $17,000 total budget to test the market for 64-bit VPS with an HP rx2600 Itanium server running 300 VPS. I anticipate that this will be a great new revenue stream for me and by differentiating my hosting products from the competition, I can position my company as a leader in hosting technology innovation."

According to an Illuminata report in August 2002, Itanium2 has leapfrogged the performance on the field. As of mid-2002, Itanium 2 outperformed MIPS, PA-RISC, SPARC64 GP and UltraSparc III. Stating that, as the Itanium family matures, it's going to give all of the alternatives more than a run for its money- it's going to give them a race for their lives. (1)

More information on Virtuozzo is available at www.sw-soft.com/products/virtuozzo.

SWsoft is an advanced server and networking software technology company focused on the development of its patent-pending Virtuozzo technology with end-to-end solutions and services for hosting service providers such as Internet data centers, application service providers, managed hosting providers and Web hosters. SWsoft's products deliver powerful, comprehensive solutions that can help data centers automate management, accelerate operations and provide excellent return on investments. For more information about SWsoft, please visit www.sw-soft.com.

(1) Illuminata, Itanium 2 Performance: WOW!, published August 27, 2002.