The Itanium Solutions Blog

The Itanium Solutions Alliance recently announced it reached agreement with Sophos (http://www.sophos.com/), a leading provider of enterprise solutions for IT security and control, to provide a new level of support for Itanium systems running on Linux.

Sophos already supports HP-UX, OpenVMS and Windows (including the recently-released Windows Server 2008) on Itanium-based systems, but with a new release of Sophos Anti-Virus coming in Q4 2008, it will now support Itanium-based systems running Red Hat EL 4.x and Red Hat EL 5.x versions of Linux.

Along with the continuing growth of Linux for mission-critical enterprise applications is, unfortunately, a parallel growth in the attacks on such systems with advanced computer viruses and malware. So the porting of Sophos Anti-Virus to support the latest Red Hat Enterprise Linux editions for Itanium is welcome news indeed.

Sophos’ approach to its Enterprise Security products is highly-regarded worldwide and with good reason.  One of the keys to this is a unique approach to what they refer to as “Behavioral Genotype Protection”® and run-time protection algorithms. These systems track not only the presence of known viruses and malware but also their artifacts as well — in registry changes and other data log alterations, all with the end result of identifying the presence of such dangers as early as possible.

Like other companies providing antivirus software, Sophos delivers proven algorithms to identify, quickly disable, and quarantine antivirus threats. But where they are different is their extensive focus on enterprise systems. They understand the importance of providing powerful control tools for setting up and managing the overall IT end-to-end security infrastructure, including centralized installation services, malware alerting mechanisms, and advanced security software appliances to monitor web gateways to your system in real-time.

The combination of these tools is a sophisticated approach to isolating both known and new malware and system threats at their earliest emergence. The tools are accurate, thorough, and run quickly with minimal IT overhead.

Add to this that the new offerings Sophos will provide are some of the most powerful and extensive anti-virus solutions for Itanium-based systems running on Linux, and you have a compelling product any of you Itanium Linux Users out there should be considering.

Watch for it in Q4 2008.

We recently announced the three category winners of the 2008 Itanium Solutions Alliance Innovation Awards and we’re impressed by the results that that have been able to achieve using Itanium-based technology.  We had a large number of entries in all categories from around the world showing how Itanium-based solutions are making a huge impact in a variety of areas. It was very challenging to pick a winner in each of the categories. But we did and the winners are…

In the category of Humanitarian Impact Innovation; The University of Houston

Researchers at the University of Houston Bioinformatics Laboratory developed an application running on Itanium-based systems to computationally identify and monitor microbial genetic diversity using the latest advances in genomic sequencing technology and high performance computing.  Drs. Yuriy Fofanov and Lennart Johnsson are tackling these challenges by focusing on how microorganisms are impacted by global warming, human activities and toxic waste.

In the category of Entrepreneurial Innovation; S7 Software Solutions

This firm based in Bangalore ported more than 2 million lines of software code and developed new instruction sets for a Fortune 100 company’s transaction processing system, which includes mortgage loans and other financial service products. The update helped the client keep pace with the competition by offering a more stable processing environment and faster transaction response times.

In the category of Enterprise Business Applications; Protégésoft

This Singaporean company replaced its outdated and cumbersome legacy mainframe system with Intel Itanium architecture to take advantage of Itanium’s availability features.  Their Financial Portfolio Builder on Itanium-based systems was a tool that helped their investment banking clients achieve annualized portfolio returns of more than 22 percent with an efficiency of almost 30,000 times faster than their previous methodology. Most impressively, the solution reduced training time from 6 months to a half day and helped increase transactions from 2 to 58,000! (Yes, we mean 2 to 58,000…or an increase of nearly 3 million percent!)

It is now prime vacation time for many and travel planning is at its peak. When you make your plans, it’s very possible you’ll be making your reservations via an Itanium-based solution.

Whether you book online, by phone, or in person, there are generally two parts to the system: an online booking engine and a company which provides the connection between that booking system and the travel providers. That second part of the system is called a Global Distribution System.

The largest global processor of these travel transactions is Amadeus Global Travel Distribution S.A., which supports more than 94,000 travel agency locations and 32,000+ airline sales offices in hundreds of countries and territories. To do so, they must manage 500 million travel bookings per year, through connections to 95% of all scheduled airlines, 22 car rental companies serving 36,000 locations, nearly 77,000 hotels, and 17 cruise lines.

On a daily basis, Amadeus handles nearly 300 million transactions of all kinds and up to 2 million internet-based bookings at their Erding, Germany data center, one of the largest civilian data centers in the world. With price competition becoming incredibly fierce, Amadeus’ Fare Quote system is in high demand. This allows customers to compare prices based on different carriers, routes, and dates before booking. How do they make this happen? At the core of their system is a growing server farm with 59 HP Integrity rx8620 servers, each of which are equipped with 16 Intel Itanium processors, running SUSE Linux and Amadeus’ Altéa reservation system. Thanks to extensive Amadeus-exclusive IT infrastructure innovations, SUSE, and the Itanium-based systems, they are able to handle more than 5,500 consumer requests per second during peak hours. The system actually takes less than one third of a second to process data inquiries and completes each fare search within five seconds.

All of this processing is an incredibly complex task. For example, when a customer is searching for the lowest airfare possible, the Amadeus solution can produce more than 200 low-fare options per query. These options have to be accurate, timely, and structured so customers can easily navigate options based on changing dates, switching airlines and airports, and even reconsidering destinations. This means providing many millions of instructions to the server system per query.
These demands make system response time, rapid reallocation and scalability critical elements to the server system.

Fortunately, for Amadeus, and probably you if you’re booking your next trip online, all of these computing needs are met with Itanium-based systems.