The Itanium Solutions Blog

Supermicro, a sponsor member of the Itanium Solutions Alliance, has come out with a new line of servers based on the Itanium 9300 series processor. The SuperServer SYS-4146B-3R system represents Supermicro’s next generation in mission-critical 24×7 business solution computing.

This 4U rackmount system provides full RAS capabilities (reliability, availability and serviceability) for today’s always-on enterprise. Key system resources are designed to be hot-swappable, enabling IT managers to keep their costs down and their options open with mainframe-class functionality. Businesses can count on these servers to perform reliably in complex, real-world environments; to provide seamless support for enterprise-class security solutions; and to heal themselves in response to a wide variety of errors that can bring down less protected platforms.

With today’s software virtualization solutions, IT organizations are consolidating 20 or more applications on a single server to dramatically improve utilization, reduce operating costs, and improve infrastructure agility. The high availability of the Supermicro SYS-4146B-3R is an ideal platform for these applications.

Read more here.

Editor’s Note: The Alliance again welcomes Jonathan Eunice, co-founder and principal IT advisor for Illuminata, to our blog. The complete series of four videos featuring Jonathan and Alliance president and executive director Joan Jacobs can be found here.

What do you need to run mission-critical apps? From a feature/function checklist perspective, the answers are pretty clear. They’re things like extremely high performance, rock-solid reliability, high-availability that doesn’t stop, the right application and support software, good value, and strong support.

See the latest and final video installment below, Safe & Sound

See the corresponding slide deck for “Safe & Sound” here.

But let’s look the requirements a little differently, a little more philosophically. What virtues are we looking for in our platforms for our most important applications? I like these:

Headroom – Mission-critical systems run mission-critical apps. They’re important. They take in money, or manage critical business processes. If they don’t perform well enough, everyone’s unhappy. Customers complain, and may balk. Executives become very cross. Bad things happen. In specifying a mission critical system, you want to ensure that there’s enough performance for the apps, services, and requirements that you have today—and those that are coming. If you get more customers, acquire a competitor, or have a massive promotion—whatever the eventuality, you want to be able to handle it with aplomb.

Safe and Sound – If you think customers and executives get cross when systems and applications perform poorly, just wait until those systems and applications go down. Unavailability is a profoundly bad outcome when the business is on the line.

Amidst and Among – You want whatever systems you source to work with the other systems, applications, and services you already have. The real world is heterogeneous, so it has to go along and get along. It has to integrate well—technically, culturally, and in every other way with the choices you’ve already made. Windows, Linux, Unix, whatever. This database vendor or that. This application or that. It must be a well-integrated into the world you have, and the one you’re constructing.

Big Iron is the architectural pattern that most clearly embodies these virtues for mission-critical databases, applications, and services, as well as for highly virtualized, highly consolidated infrastructures.

In a series of four video discussions, Alliance President and Executive Director Joan Jacobs and I have gone into more detail about how Itanium, an architecture born to run Big Iron systems and mission-critical apps, helps deliver these virtues.

As a new contributor to the Itanium Solutions blog, let me give you a quick intro. Having graduated with a computer science(CS)/math degree 25+ years ago, I’ve seen my share of changes along the way, but what surprises me most are the changes that have not yet occurred. While I was taking CS classes in the early 80’s I shied away from taking more COBOL programming classes because the ‘common wisdom’ was that COBOL applications, and the mainframe they ran on, were on a downward trend and not an area where you wanted to focus your career. The mainframe is still around, and there are more lines of COBOL code running than any other programming language. Who would have believed it?

I put my time on the mainframe as a programmer for a petroleum engineering firm, and still remember a late night onsite at one of our customers, a large bank in west Texas. After recompiling, linking and loading my latest update, I suddenly discovered that everyone was gone, the doors were locked … and could only be opened with a key that I did not possess. It was about that time, my hands-on computer programming interest waned. Today, I am a program manager in HP’s Enterprise Storage, Server and Networking group, and privileged to interact with a variety of customers and partners looking to drive innovation in the data center.

Now on to the point of this blog post – unlike 25 years ago when the mainframe was essentially the only option if you needed a highly available server, the HP Superdome has similar availability and reliability of the mainframe. The Superdome server was designed to run mission critical enterprise applications and has 128 Intel Itanium cores that can be utilized for scale-up applications using a large number of cores for single OS instance, or be partitioned to run scale-out applications running different OS’s…or both. The reliability & availability was built-in to the Superdome, not tacked on as an afterthought.

How does the HP Integrity Superdome stack up? Compared to a z10 mainframe, the Superdome has similar availability and reliability… BUT at a 3 year TCO that is 1/8th that of the mainframe. Check out the comparison in our new white paper. Having cut my teeth on the mainframe in my formative years I respect the longevity it has been able to achieve, but it sure is difficult to justify such a hefty premium when other alternatives deliver the goods.

John Pickett
Mainframe Alternative Program Manager
HP Enterprise Servers, Storage & Networking
Blog: Legacy Transformation

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.

A recent article from an Indian publication, BusinessLine, described how for over 30 years, HP NonStop has powered some of the India’s most critical installations. The article interviews Santanu Ghose, Country Head, Business Critical Systems and NonStop Servers, HP India. Ghose explains how the key fundamentals of the HP NonStop have remained the same and how they have evolved on Itanium for improved performance and energy efficiency. Ghose says:

Read the entire article from BusinessLine here.