Editor’s Note: The Alliance welcomes Jonathan Eunice, co-founder and principal IT advisor for Illuminata, to our blog. The first video in a series of four featuring Jonathan and Alliance president and executive director Joan Jacobs can be viewed below. See the corresponding slide deck here.
Itanium’s role these days is clear: It’s the engine of “Big Iron” systems running mission-critical applications. A few years back, you might have thought of that role as a limitation, given the rapid market adoption of scale-out architectures and Web applications. But the same growth in user populations, transaction rates, application workloads, and data volumes that has driven the deployment of so many scale-out systems also drives large increases in Itanium’s sweet-spot: back-end workloads. Web pages being served are only the first steps in getting tickets sold, shipping containers moved, or financial transactions engaged. Backend transactions are more important, higher-scale, and more mission-critical than ever.
Not only are individual backend workloads growing, enterprise IT is now rushing toward consolidated, virtualized infrastructures for essentially all applications. Big Iron systems—like the ones Itanium powers—are born to run both key backend apps and consolidated workloads.
You can easily see the Big Iron-ness in Itanium’s specifications. It has huge performance-oriented resources such as registers, cores, caches, and I/O buffers in each processor, and the ability to scale up processor counts, main memory, and I/O channels in large multiprocessor servers is built-in. Just as important as “build it big” is “build it safe.” Huge attention has been paid to reliability and availability features, and to scaling them up in concert with the systems they power. When you put either “many eggs” or “very valuable eggs” in a single basket, you’d better make sure that basket is very well-protected. Itanium, and the systems built around it, do.
Moving “up the stack” from systems design, Itanium’s ecosystem matches its scale-up processor attributes with appropriate scale-up systems and support—not to mention a catalog of over 14,000 software packages. Not every job requires Big Iron—but for those that do, Itanium-based systems are a worthy option.
The associated series of four video discussions between Itanium Solutions Alliance President and Executive Director Joan Jacobs and me dives into more detail about Itanium’s role as an architecture born to run Big Iron systems and mission-critical apps.
– Jonathan Eunice, Founder and Principal IT Advisor, Illuminata
