The Itanium Solutions Blog

In these days of economic turmoil, it’s tempting for industry observers to paint with a pessimistic brush. Cynicism is in vogue, and the computer business is certainly not immune. When things look the darkest and negativity prevails, it’s easy to overlook the positive. Take the Itanium architecture, for example. From its rather rocky start in the early 2000’s, Itanium has made great gains across a number of critical markets. While not the Swiss Army knife that it once hoped to provide, the architecture has earned considerable success as a foundation for powerful servers that carry the industry’s toughest workloads — as validated by the ecosystem’s growth to more than 13,000 applications, broad availability of OS environments and host of system manufacturers that offer Itanium-based solutions.

Today, more than 224,000 Itanium systems have shipped worldwide to customers who have demanded the type of mission critical performance and reliability Itanium is known for. And while not all customers require the robustness of an Itanium solution, there are countless users who rely on these solutions to power their mission critical businesses, provide critical support to their customers, and enable state of the art research that benefits the world. The Alliance is committed to recognize and share the stories of these customers and the often dramatic results they have achieved. Through our annual Innovation Awards program we seek to focus the spotlight on remarkable successes that Itanium users have created using Itanium-based systems. These stories come from around the world and from a variety of industries and research institutions.

Whether saving an enterprise a bundle in operating costs as a mainframe or RISC system replacement, helping researchers unlock the human genome or delivering complex visualization systems that protect our troops overseas, Itanium-based platforms form the backbone of projects that typify the continuing innovation in our industry — the sort of innovation that has driven and will continue to drive the industry to new levels of achievement and success.

And in today’s economic climate, it’s not enough to deliver dramatic results; those results must be reached in the most cost effective manner possible. In 2008, IDC called the Itanium platform the “fastest growing computing platform in the world.” We like to think that’s because of the real value Itanium-based solutions have to offer — value that perhaps means even more in times like these.

As marketing chair of the Itanium Solutions Alliance, I am pleased to say that our new blog is off to a great start.  Visiting the blog regularly is an easy way to stay up-to-date on news surrounding Itanium-based solutions and other items of interest to the Itanium community.  For example:

•    Linux Devices recently offered some independent reporting from an open-source perspective on the Alliance’s news of a successful 2008 and strong momentum for Itanium-based systems. http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS7477895313.html.

•    Dr. Dobb’s Portal alerted its readers in the developer community to the news regarding the successful port of Java SE 6 for Itanium.  http://www.ddj.com/java/212901759.

In the near future, the Alliance blog will include important information regarding future releases of Itanium-based solutions, performance enhancements, and developer tips on a range of topics, including Sun Java on Itanium.  I hope you’ll check back on a regular basis; or better yet, subscribe to the RSS feed.

Those of us in HP’s business critical server (BCS) business unit are very excited about the new SPECjAppServer2004 benchmark results using our Itanium-based Integrity servers. This split-tier benchmark showcases the Integrity servers at both the application level with Integrity blades and supporting Oracle 11g database with the Integrity Superdome. Achieving these results is a testament to both the power and scalability of the Integrity servers, in both rackmount and blade form factors, as well as the close engineering collaboration between HP and Oracle to optimize J2EE application servers and Oracle database servers.

The Oracle Fusion middleware strategy is very important to our customers and thus is important to all of us in the Itanium ecosystem. As we demonstrated in this benchmark Integrity servers are ideal for supporting small, medium and enterprise class organizations deploying Oracle applications, middleware, and database solutions. The results show that we achieved 30% greater performance per core than IBM using DB2 and this translates into better server utilization and cost savings for our customers.

Please follow this link for our press release and more details about the world record results HP and Oracle have achieved supporting Oracle Fusion middleware technology.

Joan Jacobs, the Alliance’s president and executive director, and I will be speaking next month at the annual Summit of the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.  We are both excited by the opportunity to share the success of the Itanium Solutions Alliance with this group of professionals who manage alliance relationships across many industries.  Perhaps more important, we’ll be sharing what the Alliance has learned over the past three plus years since the Alliance’s founding.

The theme of our presentation will be how to foster a cooperative and mutually beneficial relationship among a group of companies who are competitors in the market.  We’ll share how the common goals of the sponsor companies helped them overcome initial hesitation over forming the Alliance.  We hope that those who attend the session will be able to apply what we have learned to improve their alliance relationships.

If you are attending the summit, please join us at 4:50 p.m. on Tuesday, February 10th.  We hope to see you there.  And if you can’t attend the event but would like more information, please send an email to Joan or me.  We’d be glad to share more on this topic and learn your perspective as well.  Here’s where you’ll find more about the ASAP Summit.

Joan and I will attend other conference sessions.  We hope to take what we learn at the event to further enhance the Alliance’s success in 2009 and beyond.  Stay tuned for more on the Summit and our experiences there.

2008 was a great year for the Itanium Solutions Alliance.  The Itanium platform made solid gains in shipments (now totaling over 210,000 units) with revenues passing $1B for the last five quarters.  In EMEA, Itanium’s market segment share rose by eight percent at the end of Q3, and the list of Itanium applications now tops 13,000.  More and more enterprise customers trust their mission-critical applications to Itanium-based systems.

The thanks for all of this goes to the Alliance’s sponsors (including our newest sponsor, Supermicro), members, and Itanium end-users for their enthusiastic participation in 2008’s activities.  The Alliance draws strength from the enthusiasm of all involved and its accomplishments reflect the success of all who participate.

For 2009 we’re looking forward for another strong year, including the third annual Innovation Awards.  Stay tuned for more details in the next few weeks.  And we’re excited about the new blog and important changes to the Alliance’s web site.

The Alliance also recognizes that these are tough economic times for many. We remain convinced, however, that the Itanium platform’s ability to deliver mission critical solutions will contribute to its continued success in the market.

Want to learn more about the Alliance’s successful 2008 and plans for 2009?  Here’s a great summary.