The Itanium Solutions Blog

On September 14th from 5:00 - 8:00 pm, industry leaders in enterprise and technical computing, Alliance sponsor executives, award finalists, and industry press and analysts will convene for hors d’oeuvres, cocktails, and live music as we honor innovation and achievement in solving computing challenges using Intel Itanium technology. The event will be held on the 32nd floor of the famous Westin St. Francis Hotel with fabulous views of the city and bay.

Our Humanitarian Impact winner, COMPUTAEX of Spain, will be on hand to receive their award and winners will be announced in the categories of Mission-Critical Data, Data Center Modernization, and Computationally Intensive Applications.

Click here for more information on this year’s Itanium Innovation Awards program. If your work is related to the high end server industry and would like to attend the Awards Celebration event, please let us know.

The Frankfurt Airport is the busiest commercial airport in Germany and a major continental gateway to Europe. It’s also the ninth largest airport in the world in terms of passenger traffic and seventh in terms of cargo. For a major hub as well as destination, that means a whole lot of luggage must be delivered quickly and reliably.

Fraport AG, the owner and operator of Frankfurt Airport, needed to increase the throughput of its baggage transportation control system to handle the growth of traveler volume, especially during peak travel seasons. Yet it also had to ensure the reliability and disaster-tolerance of the system and its real-time database. By migrating to OpenVMS clusters running on Itanium-based blade servers, Fraport quadrupled the throughput of the control system with no negative impact on operations.

Download this brand new Alliance Case Study to learn more about this groundbreaking work. If you’d like the chance to meet with Rene Donner and Kay Belke of Fraport AG in person, you’ll have the chance at the 2010 Itanium Innovation Awards happening on September 14th in San Francisco. If you haven’t already received an invitation, request one here.

OpenVMS is well known as solid operating system for applications that require very high availability. Ian Miller of OpenVMS.org states: “While most enterprise-class IT environments measure uptime in days, weeks, or months, customers using OpenVMS environments regularly characterize uptime in terms of years.” In fact, a great number of the world’s stock exchanges and lottery networks run on OpenVMS.

The big news for users is that OpenVMS Version 8.4 has now been released and is available for customers. According to Jacob Van Ewyk of HP in a recent blog post, feedback from beta users has been very positive. Jacob also points out that OpenVMS 8.4 is available on the new Integrity i2 blades and that it will run as a guest operating system in HP Integrity Virtual Machines, providing another virtualization option.

The new release includes the following new features:

Detailed information about the OpenVMS 8.4 release is available here.

The OpenVMS community will be coming together for a Boot Camp in Nashua, New Hampshire from September 13 - 17th. This event offers a wide range of comprehensive technical education and training event dedicated exclusively to the HP OpenVMS Community with information driven by users for users. For more information and to register, click here.

Supermicro, a sponsor member of the Itanium Solutions Alliance, has come out with a new line of servers based on the Itanium 9300 series processor. The SuperServer SYS-4146B-3R system represents Supermicro’s next generation in mission-critical 24×7 business solution computing.

This 4U rackmount system provides full RAS capabilities (reliability, availability and serviceability) for today’s always-on enterprise. Key system resources are designed to be hot-swappable, enabling IT managers to keep their costs down and their options open with mainframe-class functionality. Businesses can count on these servers to perform reliably in complex, real-world environments; to provide seamless support for enterprise-class security solutions; and to heal themselves in response to a wide variety of errors that can bring down less protected platforms.

With today’s software virtualization solutions, IT organizations are consolidating 20 or more applications on a single server to dramatically improve utilization, reduce operating costs, and improve infrastructure agility. The high availability of the Supermicro SYS-4146B-3R is an ideal platform for these applications.

Read more here.

Intel vice president Satoshi Tadashi Munakata recently spoke on ‘IT Innovation for Growth’ at the IT Japan 2010 conference. He said “The server is the lifeblood of semiconductor design, processing speed will be increased to improve the productivity of semiconductor development.” When covering Itanium, he referred to the roadmap of the mission-critical 9300 series: “The 7th generation and the next version’s codename is ‘Poulson’. After that we are ready for ‘Kittson’.” In closing, he mentioned how it is necessary to ‘focus on core competence’ and ‘improve business productivity’ for companies’ growth in Japan’s current economic climate.