The Itanium Solutions Blog

If you haven’t seen the latest news, you might be interested in the recent headlines of the Itanium-based HP Integrity NonStop family.  In June 2008, we launched the Integrity NonStop BladeSystem – for mission-critical, 24/7 computing in a highly scalable, standards-based, bladed form factor. We also knew that small and mid-sized organizations in the healthcare, financial services, and telecommunications industries – as well as customers in emerging markets – are looking for the same things as larger customers.  For example, a hospital with 150 beds requires the same high-availability and fault-tolerance as delivered in the high-end NonStop BladeSystem but at a lower entry price.  In walks the NS2000 – launched just last week. The rack mounted Integrity NonStop NS2000 family of servers delivers high performance and fault-tolerance at the lowest cost available for a multi-core Integrity NonStop system. The NS2000 is the latest platform to leverage the reliability and scalability that Integrity and Itanium are known for.  Learn more on HP’s NS2000 page.

I have been involved with the Alliance for a few years and I must confess that it is the rewarding journey of my career. I was introduced to the Itanium platform through HP back in 2004 and I didn’t think much of it back then. It was only after HP had shipped an Integrity Server (Itanium) that I started to doodle with this machine. It was quite daunting in the beginning but we soon learned that this puppy could really run!!! The performance was simply amazing.

My company, Protegesoft, built several apps over the next few years – the most successful was of course the Financial Portfolio Builder, which optimized stock and bond portfolios dynamically. This proved to be a winning submission for the 2008 Innovation Awards. You can read more about the application on the Protegesoft website and the Alliance website.

Winning the award was not only a personal achievement, it gave us better recognition in the industry and opened more doors.

You can follow our work on Itanium more closely on the following blogs: http://itaniumsols.blogspot.com/ and http://financialportfoliobuilder.blogspot.com/. Feel free to email me.

In these tough economic times, we are all witness to the profound and unrelenting change and disruption in global economies and markets. Dealing with disruptive change is not easy — it requires careful planning, the proper assessment of risk, and the avoidance of short-term fixes to the detriment of long-term strategies. Companies are looking hard at necessary cost improvements to their IT infrastructure and doing more with less; which has become the mantra of many organizations on the path from surviving to thriving again.

Fortunately, the Itanium Solutions Alliance was formed with a common vision for a new era of mission-critical computing that includes delivering a cost effective, open standards-based infrastructure for businesses and large enterprises who need to ensure their data is protected and always available.

This year the Itanium platform will move from dual-core to a more powerful and more reliable quad-core foundation, assuring users that performance gains are keeping up with the demands of their data infrastructure.

In this video, Kirk Skaugen, VP of Intel’s Digital Enterprise Group and General Manager of Intel’s Server Platforms Group explains how a group of competitors in the mission-critical computing segment got together to form the Alliance, what that means for today’s customers, and how it helps address the requirements of tomorrow.

As rumors swirl in the marketplace regarding a possible merger of IBM and Sun Microsystems – a merger that would create a behemoth of proprietary architectures in a market increasingly looking for open standards-based solutions – one can’t help but ponder some very basic questions. Specifically:

• - What is IBM going to do with two proprietary microprocessor architectures? Not only is it extremely cost-prohibitive to continue support for separate R&D and manufacturing operations for two different architectures that serve basically the same markets, but it also creates confusion, uncertainly, and doubt with customers.
• - How long would IBM really continue to support two proprietary chip architectures? Two competing UNIX operating systems? Two competing blade systems? Two storage portfolios? Two competing services organizations? The list goes on and on. It’s hard to see the synergy or any economies of scale. If I were a Sun customer today, I would be feeling more than a little uneasy.
• - “Don’t get burned” has been IBM’s messaging about Sun and Sun’s technology for years. In the long term, what value does the IBM portfolio offer Sun customers? What value do IBM customers gain from what Sun brings to the table? Does the ability to include Java in its software portfolio make it all worthwhile?

The cost of swallowing Sun’s underwhelming portfolio – of which they have been critical for years – will be high. From my perspective, IBM seems bent on furthering its proprietary agenda and eliminating options for customers seeking a “best value” model.

Whatever the case, this questionable acquisition offers an excellent opportunity for mission-critical computing customers to evaluate their alternatives. What has been an ongoing battle between Power, SPARC, and Itanium is now essentially a two horse race. IDC data mapping Itanium-based server revenue to SPARC-based and Power-based revenue has shown Itanium rapidly gaining on both architectures and exceeding the revenue of one or both in key global markets. Given the issues that IBM will have to deal with to swallow Sun, I believe Itanium-based servers will continue to grow share.

Customers now have an even clearer choice for their mission-critical platform requirements; one that offers a robust architecture roadmap, an open standards-based platform, solutions available from leading computer manufacturers worldwide, a choice of ten Operating Systems, and an ecosystem of nearly 14,000 applications.

Itanium is continuing to show its strength in the marketplace versus the mission-critical platform competition.  IDC’s latest update of the Worldwide Server Tracker, covering the 4th quarter of 2008, shows that Itanium is continuing to take market share from key competitors.

For 2008, Itanium worldwide system revenue exceeded $5 billion, and for the seventh consecutive quarter in a row, Itanium worldwide system revenue exceeded $1 billion, the IDC report stated. Itanium worldwide system revenue for the year versus IBM POWER jumped 25%, from 51% of POWER system revenue in 2007 to 64% of POWER system revenue in 2008. Versus Sun SPARC, Itanium worldwide system revenue soared 34%, from 68% to 91% of SPARC’s system revenue on a year-to-year basis.

Itanium systems shipped increased 18% year-to-year, while POWER systems declined 22% year-to-year and SPARC systems fell 10% year-to-year, IDC reported. While it’s impossible to predict the future, the most recent industry results indicate a thriving Itanium platform that continues to show impressive strength and continued growth, especially versus proprietary RISC architectures.

Intel is enthusiastic about and fully committed to Itanium. We have a strong and healthy roadmap and pipeline of Itanium products in development. Tukwila, the quad-core Itanium processor-based platform, is on track for release later this year and two follow-on products, Poulson and Kittson, are under development. Intel is fully committed to meeting the needs of customers who have the most mission critical computing requirements, as they continue to migrate from proprietary mainframe and RISC-based solutions to open, industry-standard solutions running on Intel Itanium-based platforms.