We all thought the Itanium was a chip that Intel made and never really did any good with because nobody ever wrote anything for it. Turns out somebody did. Secure64 has launched a DNS produce thats... well... beefy, thanks to Itanium, the company says.
Running on a one-way (dual-core) HP Itanium server, Secure64's software (a modified version of NSD or Name Server Daemon) appears to crush similar software cranking away on a two-way (four-core) Opteron-based system. The company has run tests bombarding both machines with TCP Syn Flood and UDP Reflected Flood attacks and shown that the Itanium-based system can handle more than 100,000 queries while under assault, while the Opteron-based systems running NSD and BIND collapse.
[El Reg]