The Itanium Solutions Blog

I would like to share with the Itanium Solutions blog our experience with HP-UX on Itanium platforms. We initially started evaluation of the Itanium architecture shortly after it was released. Although my team and I had a very positive impression about PA-RISC technology, mainly in the area of stability and predictability, we were keen to explore possibilities offered by Itanium. As heavy HP users we were interested in preserving the current advantages of the RA-RISC platform while exploring features of the new system. Surprisingly to us, Itanium was very stable even with the early releases. After multiple tests in our non-production environment we found out that there weren’t any major obstacles in the adoption of this new technology.

We started gradually by upgrading the old PA-RISC to the new platform with the clear goal of reducing maintenance costs and improving efficiency. Normally we would apply new technologies on less important systems, but in this case, problems with scalability and performance forced us to make a decision concerning our mission-critical Billing/CRM system. Our main concerns were related to data consistency and failover scenarios. Precise planning along with close cooperation with expert HP reps made it possible to upgrade PA-RISC to Itanium sooner. And the targets we set concerning performance, scalability and TCO optimization were overachieved.

We are proud that the Itanium Solutions Alliance recognized our work and efforts on this project. The main reason I believe we were nominated and selected as the winner in Mission-Critical Data category was because of our objective to use the full functionality of the solution. The case study featuring our solution is now available for download. We welcome your questions and comments.

-Simeon Dimitrov, Mobiltel