The Itanium Solutions Blog

On behalf of the Itanium Solutions Alliance, I was delighted to see Intel’s announcement today of the Itanium Processor Series 9300 and the fact that this chip is now actively shipping to server manufacturers. This chip, code named Tukwila, has been long awaited by customers as well as ISVs and systems integrators who make up the extensive Itanium ecosystem.

Intel maintains that the 9300 will double the performance of current generation Itanium processors; great news for all who are developing mission-critical solutions on Itanium and look to harness the unique advantages of this next generation architecture. While the processor is admittedly late, to quote analyst Nathan Brookwood in a recent post: “in this class of market, it’s more important to get [the chip] right than it is to get it early”.

Intel has planned an extensive launch for this latest generation chip, read Intel’s press release, product brief, and whitepaper. I look forward to hearing reports from customers and ISVs as they begin to deploy these Itanium chips over the next several quarters.

If you haven’t seen it already, the Intel Premier IT Professional website is a great source of information for best practices in IT.

In a recent Intel Premier IT Professional Newsletter, Intel’s 2H09 Public Roadmap was featured. It shows what to expect from Intel the rest of this year for the desktop, mobile and server product lines. Itanium is featured in the “Mission Critical (MC) Platform Roadmap” on slide 11.

Click here for the 2H09 Intel Roadmap.

To subscribe to the Intel IT Professional Newsletter, send an email to admin@ipip.intel.com.

Leading analyst firms Gartner and Forrester have modernization at top of mind. As Senior Product Manager at Microsoft and sponsor of the Mainframe Migration Alliance (MMA), I join over 100+ like minded companies and organizations in this vision. Members of the Mainframe Migration Alliance are part of a community you can partner with to determine your unique roadmap for the future. Each roadmap will be a combination of retirement, interop, replacement, rehosting and/or rewriting of applications. Like MMA member, the Itanium Solutions Alliance, I see this as a place where Itanium plays an important role. You might be interested to learn about Banco Azteca who decided to migrate its mainframe applications to a Windows Server®-based operating system running on Itanium servers.

“By freeing up money from software budgets, IT departments will be able to support more innovative projects across their organizations,” explains R “Ray” Wang, Forrester vice president, in The State of Enterprise Software: 2009.

From his April report Key Issues for IT Modernization, Dale Vecchio, Research VP at Gartner explains, “New developments in hardware platforms, data center infrastructure and operating systems are providing more enterprise-class technological solutions than ever before.”

What does your roadmap look like?

Last week Intel announced a delay in the shipment of its next generation Itanium processor, code-named Tukwila, until the first quarter of  2010. While this news is disappointing to some industry observers, it will have a minimal impact on the work the Alliance is doing this year. We are currently hard at work reviewing applications for the 2009 Innovation Awards program and creating new Itanium-focused content in support of our Q2 technology theme, Data Center Modernization which includes IT Consolidation as well as mainframe migration opportunities for which Itanium is particularly well suited.

The fundamental strengths of the Itanium architecture remain its reliability, availability, and serviceability features (RAS) that are fundamental to mission-critical computing. Customers continue to extol the tangible benefits and results their Itanium-based solutions deliver. And based on the latest data from IDC and Gartner, demand for current generation of Itanium processors is strong.

The Alliance looks forward to working with Intel and its key OEMs in support of the Tukwila launch next year and in continuing to serve as a central source for Itanium successes, content, and resources. For more information on the Tukwila delay, see the following articles in CNET by Gordon Haff and vnunet.com by David Neal.

Itanium is continuing to show its strength in the marketplace versus the mission-critical platform competition.  IDC’s latest update of the Worldwide Server Tracker, covering the 4th quarter of 2008, shows that Itanium is continuing to take market share from key competitors.

For 2008, Itanium worldwide system revenue exceeded $5 billion, and for the seventh consecutive quarter in a row, Itanium worldwide system revenue exceeded $1 billion, the IDC report stated. Itanium worldwide system revenue for the year versus IBM POWER jumped 25%, from 51% of POWER system revenue in 2007 to 64% of POWER system revenue in 2008. Versus Sun SPARC, Itanium worldwide system revenue soared 34%, from 68% to 91% of SPARC’s system revenue on a year-to-year basis.

Itanium systems shipped increased 18% year-to-year, while POWER systems declined 22% year-to-year and SPARC systems fell 10% year-to-year, IDC reported. While it’s impossible to predict the future, the most recent industry results indicate a thriving Itanium platform that continues to show impressive strength and continued growth, especially versus proprietary RISC architectures.

Intel is enthusiastic about and fully committed to Itanium. We have a strong and healthy roadmap and pipeline of Itanium products in development. Tukwila, the quad-core Itanium processor-based platform, is on track for release later this year and two follow-on products, Poulson and Kittson, are under development. Intel is fully committed to meeting the needs of customers who have the most mission critical computing requirements, as they continue to migrate from proprietary mainframe and RISC-based solutions to open, industry-standard solutions running on Intel Itanium-based platforms.