Old habits tend to die hard! And here's an interesting one... The dying PA-RISC business is still big business for HP. Even today, revenue wise, the old 9000 series are pretty much on par with the latest Itanium Integrity servers. Inspite the company has announced the end of life of that line a few years ago in favour of the Itanium-based servers! During the show, HP also confirmed that they have another year of shipping the already dead Alpha servers, despite what it's said on HP's web site!

"I have a huge customer in Japan. Massive. A telco. And their choice was to continue to build out their PA-RISC environment as they add customers for capacity. But then they created a second disaster recovery site and they build it around integrity. Then, they created a new thing for their billing system and went to integrity. So what you'll see is a customer will build out with PA because it's easier. And that's why we've built long lifetime on the product. But for a green field application or a new deployment or D/R (disaster/recovery) site, they'll use Integrity servers, said HP's vice president and general manager of enterprise storage and servers, Scott Stallard.