The Itanium Solutions Blog

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.

Windows Server 2008 R2, the long awaited, standards-based OS from Alliance Charter Member, Microsoft, is now generally available. R2 provides an opportunity for data centers to increase flexibility, improve performance, reduce costs, and increase scalability. With this latest release, customers can take advantage of mainframe-class reliability, fail-over clustering, as well as massive scalability — up to 64 IA64 sockets on a single server and up to 2 terabytes of RAM. These outstanding RAS features coupled with the inherent features of Itanium, such as  EPIC architecture and large cache, provide customers a rock solid platform on which to deploy their highest performance mission-critical applications. Detailed information on Windows Server 2008 R2 is available on Microsoft website.

In addition, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 is being released this month. With SQL Server R2, organizations will be able to scale database operations with confidence, improve IT and developer efficiency, and allow users to access highly scalable and well managed BI applications at cost effective prices, especially compared to competitive alternatives. With this release on Itanium, customers can run the largest possible scale-up scenarios on SQL - up to 256 logical processors. For those of you who are running Windows applications on Itanium, please share your feedback on these exciting products from Microsoft.

While the scale up vs. scale out discussions continue at large datacenters around the globe, the question of reliability often creeps in. Most involved with server infrastructure agree that reliability is important. The question becomes “how much reliability is adequate?” Servers such as HP Integrity NonStop with triple-redundancy and a special operating system compete with mainframes on being the most reliable server solution available. 99.99999% uptime used to be the benchmark for these type of solutions. At the other end of the scale one can find hardware vendors offering servers build with desktop components and open source operating systems running the IT backbone in small and medium-sized businesses; obviously with a lot less reliability built-in. Between these extremes is where the various clusters of smaller nodes and SMP systems reside and, in my opinion, where a lot of innovation is happening.

Recently, the Itanium architecture has led the market in terms of reliability. Machine Check Architecture (MCA), reduced impact from soft errors (cosmic radiation), core-level lock step (instructions in parallel execution) and extensive error correction (ECC) on cache, bus & buffers are just some of the reliability terms that Intel and Itanium system vendors will highlight as differentiators.

But the x86 segment is not sitting still. Moore’s law allows x86 processors to carry additional circuitry dedicated to reliability and hardening of the entire server. Other innovation efforts allow virtual SMP solutions with fall-over if one of the server nodes fails. Judging the overall improvements in reliability and measuring the number of 9s is difficult, but some IT managers think this is the future.

And again, attractive solutions also exist in the middle. Take for example HP’s recent business intelligence solution which is based on cluster of 2-way Itanium servers. And for those that prefer UNIX environment, HP’s virtualization software (VSE) can provide the mission-critical reliability that only large scale up solutions did in the past.

Bottom line: Innovation around server infrastructure happens at multiple levels, with higher-end architectures such as Itanium continuing to move the goal post for reliability features, and it is increasingly difficult to measure how much actual system uptime (and how many 9s of reliability) the solution provides.

P.S. In my day job I manage Intel’s server business (including Itanium & Xeon product lines) in Europe, Middle-East & Africa.

I wanted to call your attention to a recent news release by HP discussing their internal implementation of what they claim is the world’s largest enterprise data warehouse. Business Intelligence solutions continue to be of great interest as they help companies analyze massive amounts of information to make better business decisions and gain competitive advantage. The HP enterprise data warehouse runs on 384 two-way Intel® Itanium® servers (768 RX262X processors), each with 12 gigabytes of memory and total storage in excess of one petabyte. More than 35,000 employees are actively using the enterprise data warehouse capabilities. Over 700 existing HP data marts have been retired as a result of the new solution which has led to a 70% reduction in HP’s business-intelligence operating expenses. Pretty Impressive!