alt Hacker NewsI heard about Alpha in that it while being more powerful than x86 it wasn't as alien as the competition. The boards had PCI slots and looked like normal PCs, it had Windows NT and Linux. So if your Exchange server was not handling the load you moved it to Alpha and it was good.
It also seems faith in IA64 was the meteor that killed most of these self developed RISC architectures.
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p_l • yesterday at 8:22 PM
FWIW Alpha pretty quickly went with mainly PCI + few legacy ISA slots for considerable chunk of the line, unlike competition which used proprietary buses that might have been faster but meant extra level of exotic in procurement
A VAR I worked with back in the day made great scratch for a good number of years flogging MS SQLServer on Alpha for the performance boost, which was apparently more than enough to justify the price premium for those that needed it.