The Itanium Solutions Blog

Congratulations to HP on the launch of their next generation of mission critical servers, based on the Intel Itanium 9300 series processor, which were announced this week at the Tech@Work show in Germany. The Integrity servers were rolled out as part of HP’s new mission-critical Converged IT Infrastructure strategy. The launch event consisted of a series of videos and downloadable content accompanied by live expert chats. The launch site had numerous links to whitepapers and other technical content for customers interested in finding out more about the new servers and their capabilities. One of the videos features a chat between Kirk Skaugen of Intel and Martin Fink of HP talking about Itanium and Integrity servers as having the performance and RAS features customers require when downtime simply is not an option. They also talk about the healthy, future “Itanium Roadmap” through the next generations of Poulson and Kittson which will be socket compatible with the 9300 Series. There is a lot of excellent content available on the HP launch site that is well worth viewing.

Today at the HP Tecnology@Work 2010 event in Germany, Joachim Aertebjerg & Rory McInerney of Intel will be leading the following break-out session: “BB-62 - Intel: Scalable Xeon and Itanium based servers in Mission-Critical data centres”. This session will review Intel strategy & building blocks for mission-critical server infrastructure and present leadership product development built into the Itanium processor family. Click here for more information on HP Tech@Work 2010.

As the readers of this blog know, a strong area of focus for the Alliance is mission-critical computing. When your server infrastructure absolutely can’t fail, it’s important to develop sound understanding of the technology and take a disciplined approach to project planning. For those looking to further their expertise in this area, we strongly recommend attending an upcoming webinar: “Mission Critical Systems” on May 5th. The webinar is sponsored by the Connect user group and will feature Colin Butcher, of Alliance member, XDelta Limited. He will discuss the factors governing systems availability and performance, complemented by real-life examples of the design and implementation of all aspects of a system from hardware and infrastructure to application software.

Colin has been responsible for the architectural design, implementation and management of several major projects, including satellite control, air traffic monitoring, finance data and healthcare infrastructures. His work for the the NHS Blood & Transplant Services was honored last year as part of the Itanium Innovation Awards. View the case study here. You can also view Colin describing the NHSBT project in this video.

Mission-Critical Systems Webinar:

Wednesday, May 5, 2010 5:00 AM - 7:00 AM EDT
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/380616857

Wednesday, May 5, 2010 10:00 AM - 12:00 Noon EDT
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/426881057

2009 Humanitarian Impact Winner: Kiwok Nordic AB of Sweden

Don’t miss this opportunity to nominate a worthy organization who is using Itanium-based servers to achieve impactful results. Finalists and winners in each category will receive international recognition, professionally produced promotional materials, and will be featured in an active campaign that showcases their solution. One category, Humanitarian Impact, includes a $25,000 cash award for the winning submission.

Visit the Innovation Awards microsite for more information and a submission form.

If you have any questions at all or need help in preparing a submission, please email awards@itaniumsolutions.com.

The Itanium Solutions Alliance is please to welcome its latest member, HOB Inc. from Germany, a subsidiary of HOB GmbH & Co KG. HOB offers a full line of web-to-host and connectivity solutions, plus products for classic terminal emulation, security, database access, AS/400 and UNIX connectivity. Hob Inc. continues to leverage its 20+ years experience in providing business users with secure access to critical data and applications. HOB’s Remote Desktop Virtual Private Network solution (HOB RD VPN) provides secure and high performing remote access to all enterprise data and applications, and is depended on worldwide by government agencies, financial establishments, healthcare and educational institutions. Read more on HOB here.

A HOB product, HOBVM, allows for full-virtualization of Itanium-based platforms. Using Intel’s Itanium VT-i technology feature, the product supports a number of Itanium processor generations. HOBVM is a server application for virtualization and the running of different guest machines on a local machine, as well as a client application that can be used for configuration of guests and displaying their serial and graphical consoles.

HOB also runs HOB Central, a testing and performance center made up of 80 servers from all the leading manufacturers with a wide variety of architectures and operating systems. The company recently announced the purchase of an SGI Altix 450 with 38 Intel Itanium CPUs with 76 cores and 854 gigabytes of expanded memory. The supercomputer will be used for performance and load tests of HOB server software and remote access for many simultaneous users. Read more here (German).