By Deni Connor, Network World -- Windows Server 2003 could be the impetus Intel's Itanium servers need to compete against their enterprise Unix counterparts. At the launch event for Microsoft's newest operating system last week, a variety of vendors showed off their Itanium wares. Windows Server 2003 is designed for Itanium servers. In fact, Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition runs servers with as many as 64 of the processors. HP demoed a 64-way Superdome server that took the prize for TPC-C performance, and Dell showed off its first Itanium-based server. HP claims that its first Itanium-based Superdome will ship this summer. It will used the Itanium 2 6M processor, better known as Madison, which Intel expects to ship midyear. HP is also betting the farm on Itanium - it will ship eight- and 16-way Itanium-based servers later this year and will add dual-core Itaniums to the mix in 2004, which allow two Itanium chips to be placed in each processor socket. Intel's Montecito processor, expected in 2005, will have faster dual-core processing and 18M bytes of L3 cache, sources say. In 2006 or 2007 Intel aims to ship the Tanglewood processor, which apparently will have more than two cores per chip. Dell showed off a two-way rack-mounted Itanium that is 2U high and will ship later this year. In addition, Unisys, which builds servers based on Itanium, last week announced that it supports Microsoft's Datacenter High Availability Program for Windows Server 2003. The program provides users with uninterrupted availability for their business-critical applications. The services of the Datacenter High Availability Program include tested and certified configurations, new support options and Microsoft's High Availability Resolution Queue. The Resolution Queue eliminates the need for customers to direct support requests to the specific vendor source of a problem. Further, Intel announced versions of its performance-analysis software for Windows Server 2003 and Visual Studio.Net 2003. The Intel VTune Performance Analyzer 7.0 and VTune Enterprise Analyzer 2.0 allow application and Web performance tuning on Intel-based servers. VTune Performance Analyzer 7.0 supports Intel Pentium 4, Xeon, Itanium 2 and the Microsoft Visual Studio.Net 2003 developer environment. The VTune Enterprise Analyzer 2.0 for Web Applications .Net Edition finds bottlenecks in applications running across multiple servers. The VTune Performance Analyzer 7.0 is available now for $700; the VTune Enterprise Analyzer 2.0 is available for $2,500.