The Itanium Solutions Blog

I’d like to share with the Itanium Solutions blog a mission-critical Itanium deployment from Taiwan. Taiwan’s new Labor Pension Act was set to take effect on October 1, 2008. Taiwan’s Bureau of Labor Insurance (BLI) chose to implement the National Pension System (NPS) project on Itanium 2 Unix-based servers NEC NX7700i series servers, 32 single socket servers with Dual-Core Intel® Itanium® 2 processors running on HP-UX 11.23, with Oracle’s 10g R2 database Enterprise Edition plus Real Application Cluster (RAC), Oracle’s 10g Internet Application Server Enterprise Edition, and NEC GlobalMaster system management software.

NPS serves Taiwan’s citizens who are between 15 and 65 years old and who do not participate in other programs including Labor Insurance, Farmer’s Health Insurance, Government Employee’s Insurance or Insurance for Military Personnel. The system consists of a large database which contains personal information for Taiwan’s entire population. For requirements of high performance, stable operations, high availability, and expandability, NPS is designed to provide service to both external users (the general public) as well as internal users (The Bureau of Labor Insurance). There are a total of eight Itanium-based servers used for the Application Server, the Portal Server, and the Database Server. The configuration also includes NEC’s Express5800 Xeon-based servers and NEC’s iStorage disk arrays.

By adopting the Intel® Itanium® 2 processor, we were able to take advantage of the processor’s high-end computing power and reduce the time required to process intensive SQL statements and API algorithms. Thus we increased efficiency and minimized the time needed to process over four million insurance policies. The system enables members to make on-line pension applications and search for their information via the Internet, as well as from terminals installed in all BLI offices. The provision of Internet-based applications and searches is expected to alleviate congestion at customer service counters and deliver improved convenience for members.

The results delivered by the NEC solution are remarkable. NEC NX7700i series servers can automatically detect malfunctions in the hardware before an outage occurs which minimizes downtime. This allows the Itanium 2 processors to exploit their maximum potential. Preliminary performance testing has demonstrated that the system provides impressive results. From the results observed in response time for insert/update/modify commands, the system is quite remarkable. With continuous data insertions for an extended period of time, there are no failed records. And the average response time is under two seconds.

The National Pension System powered by NEC’s Itanium-based servers provides exceptional performance, availability, and scalability and meets all of the mission critical needs of the Bureau of Labor Insurance in Taiwan.

-Emily Chou, Supervisor, IT Platform SI Business Group, NEC Taiwan Ltd.

On October 23rd, Tecplot, a Bellevue, WA based company, released updates to the 2009 versions of Tecplot 360 and Tecplot Focus. The new releases are designed for greater speeds and larger data set handling.

Tecplot’s software provide visualization and analysis that combines vital engineering plotting and advanced data visualization into one tool.

Mike Peery, Tecplot, Inc. president and CEO says:

Enhancements to the 2009 R2 version of Tecplot 360 include Windows 7 and HP/UX Itanium support. The R2 version has been fully tested and is compatible with Microsoft’s new operating system. Support for HP/UX running on Itanium hardware also has been added.

Read the press release here.

A couple of weeks ago I had the privilege of participating in the Itanium Innovation Awards along with many of my colleagues from Intel. More than 200 people from all over the world came together Sep 23 to recognize and celebrate innovative applications or services that run on mission-critical server systems powered by Intel’s Itanium® Processor. That night there were more than a dozen companies from Europe, Asia and America who were recognized as finalists for one of four Itanium Innovation Awards: Mission-Critical Data, Data Center Modernization, Computationally Intensive Applications, and Humanitarian Impact.

Whether the term “mission-critical” deals with keeping customers happy, assembly lines humming, or delivering health care solutions; its good to know that a bunch of smart, focused and innovative engineers have the tools they need, including a mission-critical microprocessor, to help them build remarkable solutions to pressing problems and to keep things running when they can’t afford to go down.

It was truly rewarding to see these real life examples of how a powerful tool like Itanium is being applied to push the bounds of innovation in these important areas. We at Intel are very much looking forward to the 2010 Itanium Innovation Awards program.