It would be interesting to know if the HP I2's are replacing older HP equipment (i.e. Alpha/PA-RISC).
It would be relevent if the customer was replacing big iron RISC systems running HP-UX with big iron IPF systems running HP-UX. But in this case they are replacing RISC systems with 2P and 4P IPF boxes running Linux. The entry level server segment is where Opteron has its biggest cost and performance advantage in things like web serving. Combine that with the fact that Linux is still biased towards x86 and this was a natural win for Opteron that never happened. It would be interesting to know why the customer didn't go AMD64/Linux and to what extent the same considerations will affect other buyer's purchase decisions in the 2P/4P server space.