The Itanium Solutions Blog

As the information economy continues to expand, and the size and quantity of server rooms around the world continue to grow, the efficiency of enterprise servers becomes an ever more important facet of environmental stewardship.

Power consumption and utilization rates per server are two key metrics that chip designers and server manufacturers are keeping a close eye on. A recent article in Computerworld highlights how green initiatives can be more cost efficient, citing energy consumption and virtualization as examples.

ComputerWorld talked to Lorraine Bartlett, vice president of business-critical systems at HP, who said that moving NonStop servers to a blade architecture was a step forward in terms of performance, footprint, energy use, and power density. HP will continue to focus on energy efficiency and cooling requirements and future NonStop systems built around Intel’s Itanium Tukwila processor will offer 25% better performance while using 25% less power.

Steve Lutz, vice president and general manager at HP, said about virtualization and Itanium-based blades:

Read the entire article from Computerworld here.

The NonStop server line was a early pioneer in mission-critical computing. Originally developed by Tandem, and later acquired by Compaq, the NonStop Integrity line is now part of HP’s high-end server offering for mission-critical computing and is powered by Intel’s Itanium processor.

Having just celebrated its 35th birthday, the Nonstop line is showing no signs of slowing down as HP recently announced a series of significant upgrades.

According to a recent article from eWeek, the NonStop upgrades will include:

- NonStop BladeCluster Express 1.2, improving performance in large, geographically dispersed environments.
- NonStop SOAP 4.0, enabling greater SOA capabilities in systems, allowing integration with open-source software including Spring, Apache Axis2, MyFaces and Hibernate.
- NonStop SQL 2.3 database, for improved service levels, programming, capacity and performance.

The next generation of the Itanium processor, Tukwila, is expected to offer double the performance of the current “Montvale” Itanium chips.

Click here for the original article from eWeek.

In this seven part video series, Ward Ralston, Group Product Manager at Microsoft, answers questions about running Windows Server 2008 R2 on Itanium.

How does Microsoft work with the Alliance to advance Itanium-based systems in the marketplace?

The second video in a series of four featuring Jonathan Eunice, co-founder and principal IT advisor for Illuminata, and Joan Jacobs, Alliance president and executive director, can be viewed below. In this episode, Jonathan discusses the reality of diversified datacenters including the management of applications, costs, and risk. See the corresponding slide deck here.

In this new Alliance whitepaper featuring 8 of our 2009 Itanium Innovation Award finalists, read how real companies tackled mission-critical issues and achieved truly outstanding results using Itanium-based solutions. The companies profiled in this whitepaper represent diverse industries from around the globe including healthcare, energy, education and retail. They  have one important thing in common, their reliance on Itanium servers to successfully power their most mission-critical operations. If you are an enterprise customer evaluating your platform options for a mission-critical application, either a move from a legacy platform or a new deployment, this paper is a must read.