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?

Alliance president Joan Jacobs and I were honored to represent the Itanium Solutions Alliance at the recent Annual Summit of the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals (ASAP). At the Awards dinner, the group honored the Alliance with its “Long-Established Alliance Award.”

The Association recognized the unique value that the Itanium Solutions Alliance has brought to the Itanium ecosystem since its founding. The Association also noted that the Alliance is unique in how competitors have come together in a collaborative environment to benefit customers who use Itanium-based solutions.

The Alliance beat out companies like IBM and EMC is this year’s program, and previous winners in the Long-Established Alliance award category include The Walt Disney Company and Coca-Cola. The Alliance is in good company indeed!

Read more about the Alliance’s award winning work in the press release.

Congratulations to all Itanium Solutions Alliance Sponsors, Charter Members, and Members! You all played a part in making this award a reality.

The Itanium architecture is known as a solid platform for data center consolidation projects and also for being a trusted foundation for mission-critical ERP applications. Two recent articles from Express Computer in India describe how two companies migrated their data center from x86 to Itanium-based systems.

Chambal Fertilisers and Chemicals Limited, (CFCL)’s IT landscape consisted of disparate IT systems with standalone x86 servers running discrete homegrown applications spread across regional offices to manage its in-house financial and transactional systems. These standalone x86 servers, running at various utilization rates, had performance issues whenever the production demand was high. CFCL’s manufacturing plant servers ran commercial and other core applications alongside niche applications on x86 servers, making it difficult to consolidate data. “It was a case of too many servers, too many applications, and too much customization—leading to increased spending on maintenance,” said V S Rao, Manager–IT, CFCL. CFCL decided to mitigate unexpected risks through the installation of HP Integrity servers fitted with dual-core Intel Itanium processors and running HP-UX 11i v2 to ensure high availability and simpler management. Read the entire article here.

Amalgamated Bean Coffee Trading Company Limited (Café Coffee Day) is a fully integrated coffee company that manages growing, harvesting, roasting, blending, exporting and retailing of coffee. To manage its growing, multi-faceted and geographically dispersed business, the company realized it needed an integrated solution to handle production and supply chain management. This new ERP environment would be critical to the smooth running of its business, and the company placed great emphasis on selecting the best platform to run its SAP software to ensure the highest possible levels of protection for its ERP environment. Café Coffee Day uses SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Priority Support for SAP Applications. The company also worked with PSI Data System to handle the migration from the original Intel Xeon-based platform to an Itanium-based platform. Read the entire article here.

I want to talk about the innovation happening in APAC and the 2009 Itanium Solutions Alliance Innovation Awards. Last year, two member companies from APAC, namely Protegesoft and S7 Software, were winners in two out of the three categories. While I did expect that APAC companies would do well at the awards (I have met many with very innovative applications), I certainly did not expect to find two winners from APAC. I hope that after last year’s success, we will get even more submissions this year from APAC companies and that APAC will provide at least one winner this year. (I wanted to say that APAC will provide all the winners this year but that might incur the “wrath” of my other colleagues in the US and EMEA.

The Alliance extended the deadline to submit for this award to June 3rd. If you are developing a submission and need assistance, I suggest an email to awards@itaniumsolutions.com.

I also wanted to share that I finally caught the movie “Slumdog Millionaire” two weeks ago (yes, I am a little behind with my movies)… and no, I am not going to start gushing about how great the movie was (you have all heard and read about that already). What a great story though, written by an Indian - very creative.

And in the context of what I mention above – not only can Asians write great stories; we can also develop great application software… even better when it takes advantage of the capabilities inherent on an Itanium based system.

Here’s to another Asian winner in the ISA Innovation Awards - Go APAC!