Why Itanium?

I get this question all the time - Why Itanium and why not Xeon?

It all depends on the kind of application you're running. Itanium based servers give better compute power over Xeon based servers. While Xeon based servers gives good price performance for data intensive applications.

Most of your .NET applications run on the Itanium chip set without much modification. So the effort is really not intensive. You can develop the application in a 32bit environment and recompile it in a 64bit - this way you can save alot on your development environment.

As far as I know, there are some compatibility issues, but there is no need to sweat over it!!!