The Itanium Solutions Blog

Hello All, I am Thierry Uso, a telecom consultant. In my spare time, I port open source software on the OpenVMS/Itanium platform. In this post, I present my port of JRuby 1.4.0.

JRuby (http://jruby.org/) is an implementation of the Ruby programming language on top of a Java Virtual Machine (JVM). JRuby consists of a Ruby interpreter written entirely in Java and a full AOT/JIT compiler which compiles Ruby code to Java bytecode.

JRuby 1.4.0 supports Ruby 1.8.7 and partially 1.9. Porting this JRuby version was an easy task: No modification of the JRuby code was necessary. The startup scripts of the JRuby tools (interpreter, compiler, console, gem…) were re-written in DCL with the accurate settings of logical names and JVM parameters (http://vmsfree.ouvaton.org/freen/index.php?s=jruby).

JRuby is currently the only way to run modern Ruby applications on an OpenVMS/Itanium platform since no recent version of MRI (the Ruby interpreter written in C) exists on that platform. I performed some preliminary tests which show fair response times but feedback is welcome.

-Thierry Uso

Two recent posts on the SAP Community Network blog offer some good insight on designing and running various computing environments on Itanium. Zoran Popovic is a Senior Systems Engineer at Hemofarm, an international pharmaceutical group based in Serbia. The content is geared toward those who own SAP on Itanium and Windows, and for those interested in SAP, Itanium and virtualization.

In “SAP, Linux, Virtualization and - Itanium …” Zoran talks about how his firm’s IT infrastructure, originally based on 10 Integrity servers with HP-UX, then Windows, has grown and evolved over the years. Today, five years later, their system is twice as large with a 1TB database. Zoran states:

Hemofarm’s SAP landscape is quite diverse and currently consists of: ERP systems, BI systems, CEN system, NW04, Solution Manager, EWA, monitoring, SAP routers, SAP Web Dispatchers, network printing servers, and different sandbox and other systems.
The main argument for Itanium system application is usage within OLTP systems and databases. In order to address low server utilization rates, Zoran suggests that consolidated OS environments be isolated and that is usually done through some form of virtualization.

In a follow up post “SAP, Linux, Virtualization and - Itanium … continued” he illustrates some new findings and results from the system and speaks to those interested in SAP with virtualization about moving from Windows or Unix to Linux.

Some approximate tests were run and improvised benchmarks with virtualized and bare metal SAP systems are posted for ERP, ERM, and ERC. The goal was to make a comparison with similar bare metal systems and different platforms — not making exact results comparable with some official tests.

About Itanium in the data center, Zoran States:

Zoran is interested in making further inquiries and welcomes any suggestions and recommendations both about benchmarking and this environment in general.

Read Zoran’s posts in full here:

SAP, Linux, Virtualization and - Itanium …
SAP, Linux, Virtualization and - Itanium … continued.

We welcome a new blog to the Itanium Solutions blogroll “Legacy Transformation - the cost of doing nothing.” This blog from HP sees regular contributions from experts in mainframe modernization who share tips and tools on working with legacy code, energy savings, lowering TCO, and more.

A recent post “Ropes, Strings, and Threads” describes the continuing development of the “Visual Intelligence Explorer” tool and how it allows developers to extract clusters of code from a complex graph of an entire application. This is helpful to drill down into code and determine which cloned code is the most important.

In this seven part video series, Ward Ralston, Group Product Manager at Microsoft, answers questions about running Windows Server 2008 R2 on Itanium.

How does Microsoft work with the Alliance to advance Itanium-based systems in the marketplace?

The second video in a series of four featuring Jonathan Eunice, co-founder and principal IT advisor for Illuminata, and Joan Jacobs, Alliance president and executive director, can be viewed below. In this episode, Jonathan discusses the reality of diversified datacenters including the management of applications, costs, and risk. See the corresponding slide deck here.