You can buy old Itanium hardware super-cheap now on eBay. I got an HP Integrity RX2620 for £58 which included tax and delivery.
As hardware goes it's .. interesting. It's fast. But it uses huge amounts of power and requires massive cooling (if you disable any of the 4 or 5 fans in my 2U machine, it overheats in 5 minutes). It has early EFI which should be quite familiar if you've used UEFI on the command line. And it has excellent iLO / remote / serial support so it's great practice for learning about enterprise ops.
It's getting hard to find software that runs on it. The last Debian (Wheezy) runs, but current Debian has dropped ia64 support. RHEL dropped support years ago. You'll find there are lots of strange bugs because people no longer test their software on this platform.
>> You can buy old Itanium hardware super-cheap now on eBay. I got an HP Integrity RX2620 for £58
My last gig had an Itanium running some HP-UX software that had been cobbled together over the past 20 (?) years. eBay provides cheap parts to upgrade the server as well as put together a machine for the failover datacenter.
CPU and RAM were both cheap. However, you're stuck with commodity SCSI drives which are still expensive for the largest sizes. 300GB drives, NIB and matching are like $150 USD a piece.
I agree it's strange. If you pull any fan, the machine hard shuts down a few minutes later (it even warns you of this in a note printed inside the case). Presumably if a fan fails and you don't manage to get to it in a few minutes, then you're out of luck. The only good thing is that it is possible to hot-swap a fan in a few seconds if the fan is failing-but-not-failed (if that ever happens - it seems unlikely).
Edit: Would love to know what the list price of my machine was back in 2006. Probably thousands ...
"Time of introduction: 2002-2003 (rx2600)/December 2004 (rx2620) with prices at the time starting at $7,300 (entry rx2600), $16,000 (average rx2600) to $33,000 (large rx2600)."
I never got further than a quote. The most exotic hardware I actually bought were a DEC Alpha and a whole bunch of SGI gear (at considerable discount).
As hardware goes it's .. interesting. It's fast. But it uses huge amounts of power and requires massive cooling (if you disable any of the 4 or 5 fans in my 2U machine, it overheats in 5 minutes). It has early EFI which should be quite familiar if you've used UEFI on the command line. And it has excellent iLO / remote / serial support so it's great practice for learning about enterprise ops.
It's getting hard to find software that runs on it. The last Debian (Wheezy) runs, but current Debian has dropped ia64 support. RHEL dropped support years ago. You'll find there are lots of strange bugs because people no longer test their software on this platform.
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