The Itanium Solutions Blog

Firstly, congratulations and good luck to all the finalists of the 2010 ISA Innovation Awards. As always, I am particular pleased to see two APAC companies in the list of finalists. I would also like to congratulate the Humanitarian Impact winner – COMPUTAEX.

Calendar Q2 has been particularly busy… I had the opportunity to participate in the launch events for HP’s Next Generation Integrity Systems (NGIS) across several cities in APAC.

The launch events were like any other HP events that I have attended in the past – well organized with the agenda well structured. What I felt was even better this time was the level of interest and excitement from the attendees to the NGIS… and I am not exaggerating here.

In some of the cities that I attended, there were several questions related to the NGIS that was asked at the end of the keynote – something you do not see often from the “more conservative” Asian audience. In all of the cities that I attended, there was a lot of interest shown in the actual Integrity blades that were being shown at the back of the hall. Prior to the start of the event, at the coffee breaks and even at the end of the event, a lot of the attendees crowded around to get a closer look at the new Integrity blades and asked lots of questions.

I find the new Integrity blades to be quite innovative in its design and I particularly liked how it scales from a 2S blade up to an 8S blade via the Blade Link module at the front of the blade. Best of all, it shares the same enclosure or chassis as the ProLiant blades.

HP talks about Converged Infrastructure and this is a great example of it – a single architecture for both x86 servers and non-x86 mission critical servers.

Congratulations to HP on the successful launch of the “mission critical converged infrastructure”.

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?

On behalf of Intel Asia Pacific (APAC), I’d like to congratulate Dhairyasheel & the CMC team for being selected as a finalist in the Mission-Critical Category of the Itanium Solutions Alliance (ISA) Innovation Awards.

As the former chairman of ISA in APAC, I hope that we will see a winner in these awards again this year from the APAC region and CMC is certainly in with a chance.

Regardless of the outcome, being selected as a finalist is a good recognition for CMC’s capabilities as an innovator on the Itanium platform especially with the quality of submissions for this award this year.

Our congratulations once again and good luck with the results next week.

Congratulations to Kiwok Nordic AB, the winner for the Humanitarian Impact category and all the finalists for this year’s Innovation Awards announced last week. Having gone through the list of submissions, I must say that the quality of submissions was really high… and innovative which is what the awards are about. Since 2 of the 3 winners from last year were from the APAC region, this year I need to give due credit and congratulate the impressive number of finalists from Europe this year…. all 8 of them!

Among the other finalists, Revenue Management Solutions from Tampa, Florida is particularly interesting to me. Their solution clearly solves a business problem for end users and fully utilizes the Itanium’s server capability.

While they didn’t become finalists, APAC submitters SK Telecom from South Korea and CMC Limited from India highlighted mission-critical solutions producing impressive results in their various fields.

Regardless of who wins the other awards when they are announced in September, the real winner is undoubtedly “innovation” which is clearly alive and well on the Itanium platform. All this bodes well for the future.

I have often been asked to define what I consider to be “mission-critical” since it can mean different things to different people. My Intel colleague in Europe, Joachim Aertebjerg, posed a similar question in a recent post. Is it a system with five 9s reliability or seven 9s? For some users, five 9s is good enough while for others seven 9s is still not good enough. (Seven 9s, by the way, is approximately just over 3 seconds downtime per year).
 
What I usually tell customers is to consider this - a manufacturing company ships out 10 PCs, 30 printers and 1 server from its manufacturing facilities every minute. So what is the cost of every minute of downtime? What about 10 minutes of downtime? I’ll let you do the math. Some may argue that such small interruptions are fine as they can work overtime to catch up; but what if it is the end of quarter where quarter close revenues will be impacted? Or if the shipment is destined for a very important customer where future orders depended on this shipment reaching its destination on time?
 
A more obvious example would be systems used in a stock exchange or other financial services institutions. The cost of downtime here could run into billions of dollars not to mention other implications like loss of reputation, etc. I’ll have more to say about this soon.
 
For customers that need this level of mission-critical, Itanium-based systems can deliver.