The Itanium Solutions Blog

Itanium Solutions Alliance member, Insyde Software, has announced that its flagship product InsydeH2O supports, and is shipping on its customers’ latest and most advanced Itanium and Xeon platforms from the Intel.

Insyde certainly has not wasted any time in taking advantage of the commonality between the Itanium and Xeon lines. These processors share several platform ingredients, including the Intel QuickPath Interconnect, the Intel Scalable Memory Interconnect, the Intel 7500 Scalable Memory Buffer, and the I/O hub (Intel 7500 chipset), and these features allow companies like Insyde to develop features more quickly for a wider variety of mission-critical, enterprise, data center and volume server customer designs.

Insyde Software has long been a pioneer in providing firmware and engineering services in the server industry. The company was first-to-market with UEFI-based BIOS in support of the Intel Itanium server platform in 2005 and today is proud to call leading server manufacturers such as Bull, Egenera, Inspur, NEC, SGI, and Supermicro, among numerous others, as its customers.

Last month, Insyde co-presented a technical session at the Intel Developer Forum in Beijing with its customer and leading China-based server vendor, Inspur. The session covered UEFI server firmware advancements in support of large-scale server systems.

Read the original press release from Insyde Software here.

Today at the HP Tecnology@Work 2010 event in Germany, Joachim Aertebjerg & Rory McInerney of Intel will be leading the following break-out session: “BB-62 - Intel: Scalable Xeon and Itanium based servers in Mission-Critical data centres”. This session will review Intel strategy & building blocks for mission-critical server infrastructure and present leadership product development built into the Itanium processor family. Click here for more information on HP Tech@Work 2010.

As the readers of this blog know, a strong area of focus for the Alliance is mission-critical computing. When your server infrastructure absolutely can’t fail, it’s important to develop sound understanding of the technology and take a disciplined approach to project planning. For those looking to further their expertise in this area, we strongly recommend attending an upcoming webinar: “Mission Critical Systems” on May 5th. The webinar is sponsored by the Connect user group and will feature Colin Butcher, of Alliance member, XDelta Limited. He will discuss the factors governing systems availability and performance, complemented by real-life examples of the design and implementation of all aspects of a system from hardware and infrastructure to application software.

Colin has been responsible for the architectural design, implementation and management of several major projects, including satellite control, air traffic monitoring, finance data and healthcare infrastructures. His work for the the NHS Blood & Transplant Services was honored last year as part of the Itanium Innovation Awards. View the case study here. You can also view Colin describing the NHSBT project in this video.

Mission-Critical Systems Webinar:

Wednesday, May 5, 2010 5:00 AM - 7:00 AM EDT
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/380616857

Wednesday, May 5, 2010 10:00 AM - 12:00 Noon EDT
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/426881057

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.