The Itanium Solutions Blog

It has been a while since my last posting… and can you believe that it is April already?! A lot has happened with Intel in the APAC region since my last posting and I want to talk about some of them here.

Firstly, let me talk about the recent launch of the Itanium 9300 Series. I know that both our direct OEM customers and end customer users are excited about this launch and are looking forward to testing and deploying the new 9300 based systems in their various mission-critical environments. Watch for announcements from our OEM customers on their new 9300 based systems as we move into the second quarter of this year.

I also want to use this blog to congratulate our engineering team and recognize them for the great work that they did in developing this product. It wasn’t an easy task given that the development and engineering teams were spread across several locations (Fort Collins, Hudson, Ocotillo and Costa Rica) and they really delivered a great product with improvements in performance, energy efficiency, and the virtualization capabilities. I won’t go into detail here, but more information can be found here.

Secondly, it is that time of the year again when we look for submissions for the 2010 Itanium Innovation Awards. In my last posting, I congratulated CMC Ltd of India on being chosen as a finalist in this award. By the way, all the case studies from the 2009 award finalists and winners can be found here on the ISA web site.

I am looking forward to again seeing entries coming in from APAC this year but do hurry as the official submissions close date is April 12, slightly earlier than in previous years.

Hopefully we’ll see more great award finalists and winners from APAC. Wouldn’t that be great?

As a new contributor to the Itanium Solutions blog, let me give you a quick intro. Having graduated with a computer science(CS)/math degree 25+ years ago, I’ve seen my share of changes along the way, but what surprises me most are the changes that have not yet occurred. While I was taking CS classes in the early 80’s I shied away from taking more COBOL programming classes because the ‘common wisdom’ was that COBOL applications, and the mainframe they ran on, were on a downward trend and not an area where you wanted to focus your career. The mainframe is still around, and there are more lines of COBOL code running than any other programming language. Who would have believed it?

I put my time on the mainframe as a programmer for a petroleum engineering firm, and still remember a late night onsite at one of our customers, a large bank in west Texas. After recompiling, linking and loading my latest update, I suddenly discovered that everyone was gone, the doors were locked … and could only be opened with a key that I did not possess. It was about that time, my hands-on computer programming interest waned. Today, I am a program manager in HP’s Enterprise Storage, Server and Networking group, and privileged to interact with a variety of customers and partners looking to drive innovation in the data center.

Now on to the point of this blog post – unlike 25 years ago when the mainframe was essentially the only option if you needed a highly available server, the HP Superdome has similar availability and reliability of the mainframe. The Superdome server was designed to run mission critical enterprise applications and has 128 Intel Itanium cores that can be utilized for scale-up applications using a large number of cores for single OS instance, or be partitioned to run scale-out applications running different OS’s…or both. The reliability & availability was built-in to the Superdome, not tacked on as an afterthought.

How does the HP Integrity Superdome stack up? Compared to a z10 mainframe, the Superdome has similar availability and reliability… BUT at a 3 year TCO that is 1/8th that of the mainframe. Check out the comparison in our new white paper. Having cut my teeth on the mainframe in my formative years I respect the longevity it has been able to achieve, but it sure is difficult to justify such a hefty premium when other alternatives deliver the goods.

John Pickett
Mainframe Alternative Program Manager
HP Enterprise Servers, Storage & Networking
Blog: Legacy Transformation

Earlier this month it was announced that Oracle Database 11g Release 2 version (11.2.0.1) has now been certified with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (12.0, 12.1) on the HP-UX Itanium platform. E-Business Suite certified platforms, also called “Rapid Install Supported,” are platforms where there is a corresponding release package and both the application and database tiers of E-Business Suite are supported. Linux Itanium and Windows Itanium are currently Oracle certified as Database Tier Only.

Read more about the Oracle certification levels here.

A regular contributor to the Itanium Solutions blog, Christian Tanasescu, has been promoted to vice president of software engineering at SGI. In his new role, Christian will be responsible for system software and middleware development, independent software vendors (ISVs) relationships, applications benchmarking and SGI’s cloud computing solution, Cyclone™.

Since joining SGI in 1992, Mr. Tanasescu has held a number of technical management roles including: HPC system engineering, strategic partner management, performance modeling and application enablement programs.

View a collection of Christian’s posts to the Itanium Solutions blog.

Read the original press release from SGI.

Congratulations Christian!

Hello All, I am Thierry Uso, a telecom consultant. In my spare time, I port open source software on the OpenVMS/Itanium platform. In this post, I present my port of JRuby 1.4.0.

JRuby (http://jruby.org/) is an implementation of the Ruby programming language on top of a Java Virtual Machine (JVM). JRuby consists of a Ruby interpreter written entirely in Java and a full AOT/JIT compiler which compiles Ruby code to Java bytecode.

JRuby 1.4.0 supports Ruby 1.8.7 and partially 1.9. Porting this JRuby version was an easy task: No modification of the JRuby code was necessary. The startup scripts of the JRuby tools (interpreter, compiler, console, gem…) were re-written in DCL with the accurate settings of logical names and JVM parameters (http://vmsfree.ouvaton.org/freen/index.php?s=jruby).

JRuby is currently the only way to run modern Ruby applications on an OpenVMS/Itanium platform since no recent version of MRI (the Ruby interpreter written in C) exists on that platform. I performed some preliminary tests which show fair response times but feedback is welcome.

-Thierry Uso