The Itanium Solutions Blog

I read with interest Ashlee Vance’s recent article in the NY Times, where according to sources, Sun is canceling its Rock chip project after 5 years of development work at a cost estimated in the billions. For all those Sun customers who have been patiently waiting and delaying server purchases in anticipation of Rock, this has to be a huge disappointment. Jon Stokes of Ars Technica further speculates that if Rock has fallen by the wayside, in the long run can SPARC be far behind? In any case we will all be following the latest developments from Oracle as they move forward to absorb Sun. In the meantime I encourage IT decision makers looking for a “rock solid” mission-critical computing platform to visit the Alliance site, check out the Itanium platform and hear from customers the positive impact Itanium-based solutions are having on their businesses.

On June 24, Oracle announced a new world record benchmark on Itanium. Here’s an excerpt from the release:

“Today, Oracle announced world record multi-node SPECjAppServer2004 benchmark results for Oracle(R) Fusion Middleware.

The combination of Oracle WebLogic Server, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, together with Oracle Database 11g on mission-critical HP Integrity server blades running HP-UX 11i v3 delivered the record-breaking results, further demonstrating Oracle Fusion Middleware’s leadership in Java application server performance and scalability.

With this result, Oracle surpasses the best IBM WebSphere multi-node result with IBM DB2 by delivering more than 18 percent greater performance per core.”

Click here for details.

For more Oracle information on Itanium, a great resource is the the Oracle E-Business Blog, where Steven Chan makes regular announcements on Itanium certifications.

IT professionals face untold challenges every day. Competitors increase pressure with new products and services. Budgets are squeezed. Business leaders demand dynamic applications to meet new objectives. Meeting conflicting demands requires new approaches, one of which is moving applications and data from older legacy systems to open architecture-based solutions.

The Alliance is pleased to offer a new white paper, Seven Tactics to Lower the Risk and Optimize the ROI of Data Center Modernization (PDF), which defines how to facilitate the process. The white paper walks through the steps of planning, preparing, and executing data center modernization. We hope you will find it a useful resource in today’s challenging business environment.

Click here for additional information on Data Center Modernization.

Greetings! Intel continues our productive collaboration with Sun Microsystems on porting Sun’s J2SE implementation to Itanium® architecture, resulting in a regular cadence of Itanium® releases with constantly improving performance, security, and overall quality. Some time ago we released JDK & JRE 6u13 for Itanium, a security update release. Now I’m glad to attract your attention to the 6u14 release for Itanium which has just been made available at the Java™ SE download site.

The 6u14 release includes improved performance on a range of server workloads. This is achieved with both platform independent work described in Java SE 6 Update 14 Release Notes and Itanium specific improvements such as optimized memory copy routines and C2 JIT compiler enhancements. Also in 6u14 we enabled the Serviceability Agent on Windows/Itanium, with a few limitations described here. In 6u12 for Itanium, the Serviceability Agent was included in the Linux distribution only. And of course the 6u14 release for Itanium contains the enhancements and fixes described in Java SE 6 Update 14 Release Notes, but with a few exceptions related to new features: the Garbage First (G1) garbage collector and the Compressed object pointers are not yet ported to Itanium. We are working to enable those features for Itanium and the results may be available in one of the future update releases later this year. For more information about the release including command line options for maximum performance please refer to the Java SE 6 Update 14 for Itanium Release Notes.

Another important event which happened since my previous post was the JavaOne 2009 conference.  JavaOne is the largest and the most significant conference in the Java world, a gathering of thousands of Java developers.  In the pavilion, showcasing latest accomplishments in the Java technologies, we presented a demo devoted to Java 6 for Itanium® architecture.  An eye-catchy animation demonstrated comparative SPECjbb2005 performance on several J2SE 6 releases for Itanium including the latest 6u14, on the currently available dual-core Intel® Itanium® Series 9100 (code name Montvale) and the next generation Itanium® quad-core (code name Tukwila). The demo clearly illustrated substantial boost in 6u14 over 6u12 and the doubling of performance (for that workload) on Tukwila over Montvale.  The flow of visitors to our booth was constant and the booth team talked virtually non-stop in highlighting our results and the Itanium platform.  If you were fortunate enough to see this demo at JavaOne thanks for attending!

That’s all important news I have at the moment.  We are hard at work on our next releases and I’ll soon be back with more updates.  Until then, don’t hesitate to add your comments!

Leading analyst firms Gartner and Forrester have modernization at top of mind. As Senior Product Manager at Microsoft and sponsor of the Mainframe Migration Alliance (MMA), I join over 100+ like minded companies and organizations in this vision. Members of the Mainframe Migration Alliance are part of a community you can partner with to determine your unique roadmap for the future. Each roadmap will be a combination of retirement, interop, replacement, rehosting and/or rewriting of applications. Like MMA member, the Itanium Solutions Alliance, I see this as a place where Itanium plays an important role. You might be interested to learn about Banco Azteca who decided to migrate its mainframe applications to a Windows Server®-based operating system running on Itanium servers.

“By freeing up money from software budgets, IT departments will be able to support more innovative projects across their organizations,” explains R “Ray” Wang, Forrester vice president, in The State of Enterprise Software: 2009.

From his April report Key Issues for IT Modernization, Dale Vecchio, Research VP at Gartner explains, “New developments in hardware platforms, data center infrastructure and operating systems are providing more enterprise-class technological solutions than ever before.”

What does your roadmap look like?