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.

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”.

The submissions for the Itanium Innovation Awards were officially scored by our panel of judges on (i) Results produced by solution, (ii) Cost/benefit of solution, (iii) Difficulty of problem addressed by solution, and (iv) Originality of solution (and for the Humanitarian Impact category: Number of persons affected by solution). Within those criteria however, our judges applied their own experience and perspectives on what they were looking for as key differentiators.

One of this year’s judges, Kumaran Pillai, recently blogged about his impressions of this year’s submissions in the Data Center Modernization Category, offering specific insight on how qualified, technical submissions can be ranked against each other.

Kumaran writes:

Click here to read the original post.

Kumaran should know a thing or two about modernizing data centers, he and his company Protegesoft won an Itanium Innovation Award in 2008!

On behalf of the Itanium Solutions Alliance, I would like to congratulate our 2010 Innovation Award Humanitarian Impact winner and category finalists who are being announced this week. Our Humanitarian winner is COMPUTAEX from the the Extremadura region of southwestern Spain. COMPUTAEX relies on an Itanium-based supercomputer to support a wide variety of complex social, environmental, and scientific improvement projects for the region. Their entry was truly outstanding and we applaud their significant list of achievements and positive impact since completing their launch in March 2009.

I would also like to recognize the impressive list of finalists in our other categories as selected by our esteemed panel of judges. They are as follows:

Computationally Intensive Applications:

- COMPUTAEX
- eBay
- University of Malaga

Data Center Modernization:

- Fraport AG
- Future Electronics
- MegaFon

Mission-Critical Data:

- Nordea Bank Finland
- Taiwan’s Bureau of Labor Insurance
- The Shanghai Stock Exchange
- Yodobashi Camera

Winners of these other categories will be announced on September 14th, 2010 at the Innovation Awards Celebration in San Francisco at The Westin St. Francis. This was a banner year for the Innovation Awards program, with submissions received from across the globe from companies, universities and not for profit organizations — all of whom are realizing truly impressive results from their Itanium-based servers. Thank you to all of our entrants and to our judges!