The Itanium Solutions Blog

Hello, I am Michael Gruen, an IT Project Manager for Bernalillo County; which is located in central New Mexico. I am the technical lead for all server and storage related Data Center projects here the County.

I’d like to thank the panel of judges of the Itanium Solutions Alliance Innovation Awards for selecting Bernalillo County as the winner of the Data Center Modernization category. When we started this project we saw it as a way to save taxpayer money while improving performance and reliability. We never anticipated the project becoming formally recognized in this major way.

We started the project as a means to upgrade aging hardware that supported many of the departments within the County including Public Safety, the County Clerk’s office, the Assessor’s Office and others. During the project planning phase, we determined that if we replaced our existing servers with the same number of current technology servers, the new servers would, for the most part, be underutilized.

As a result, we decided to take advantage of HP Integrity HP-UX blade servers and an HP software solution called HP Integrity Virtual Machines which allowed us to decrease the number of physical servers we purchased while maintaining the same separation of services that we had in our original environment. Our current environment has approximately 60% fewer physical machines than before.

Using this same suite of software and the newest generation of HP’s Integrity HP-UX blade servers, we anticipate being able to further reduce the number of physical machines we have in place when we build out our new data center in the near future.

If you’re interested reading more about our Itanium-based project, the Case Study is available here. Feel free to share your comments or questions.

Thanks,

Michael Gruen