The Power of Partnership
This collaboration continues to bear fruit in many ways.
At its simplest level, the companies provide the many building blocks of hardware platforms (too many to mention), OS choices (from Linux to customized Unix to Windows), and mission-critical enterprise applications for financial and customer management (and others).
Another way is through careful coordination by multiple partners to optimize a solution to best benefit a customer. Great examples of this include:
- The Scottish Life Division of Royal London Group migrated more than ten million lines of code and nearly a billion data records to a new Itanium-based system, thanks to the leadership of MSS International, a system migration specialist, MicroFocus Studio and Server for legacy applications issues, HP for its HP Integrity, HP 9000, StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array Systems, and HP OpenView, and Oracle with its 9i Database, Application Server, Oracle Management Pack, and Oracle Data Guard. The end result improved batch job run times by one-third and cut the total cost of ownership by 50%.
- Kindred Healthcare responding to its ten-fold increase of database size over eight years (to two Terabytes) by moving to an Itanium-based platform resulting from the combined efforts of HP with its Integrity rx7620 and rx4640 servers, SAP with its mySAP ERP 2005 solution, Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2000, and other custom enhancements. Online user response time was improved from 1.3 to 8.0 times (depending on the application and number of users); report generation improved by more than two times; and batch processing was 24% faster.
A third way is through the rapid development and deployment of specific new applications which leverage the latest advancements by other Alliance members. Some of the recent enhancements involve Intel Virtualization Technology for the Itanium architecture at the hardware level itself and are now being fully supported by Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 and NEC, Fujitsu, Hitachi, and HP, among others.
Finally, a conscious team-oriented collaboration helps produce innovative and breakthrough products. One of the best examples is the recently announced Itanium-based solution featuring dynamic partitioning, full hot-adding of processors, memory, and I/O host bridges for Windows Server 2008.
Ultimately the partnership between Itanium Solutions Alliance members and you is probably the most important. It’s those relationships between you and your providers that are the links between what you want to achieve with your computing and how you’ll achieve those goals. Dr. Carlos Simmerling of Stony Brook University, the winner of the Alliance’s Humanitarian award in 2007, discussed that a key reason why his biomedical research modeling performed so well was due to hands-on application and integration support from Alliance Founder SGI. SGI’s team offered valuable insight which helped his application run as quickly as possible. Thanks to the collaboration between SGI and Dr. Simmerling’s team’s efforts in the modeling area, we may be significantly closer to a cure for HIV.
Sometimes we need to take a step back to recognize how important teamwork is in today’s computing world. Indeed, how vital are the individual players in your computing environments vs. a collaborative approach? Do you trust your IT decisions to someone outside your department or are you picking and choosing the players for your own “Dream Team”? What do you expect to gain from working with a community of hardware and software vendors?