The Itanium Solutions Blog

Intel vice president Satoshi Tadashi Munakata recently spoke on ‘IT Innovation for Growth’ at the IT Japan 2010 conference. He said “The server is the lifeblood of semiconductor design, processing speed will be increased to improve the productivity of semiconductor development.” When covering Itanium, he referred to the roadmap of the mission-critical 9300 series: “The 7th generation and the next version’s codename is ‘Poulson’. After that we are ready for ‘Kittson’.” In closing, he mentioned how it is necessary to ‘focus on core competence’ and ‘improve business productivity’ for companies’ growth in Japan’s current economic climate.

Are you developing on HP-UX for Itanium? Make sure you have the latest roadmap by clicking here. The next major update (update 7) is coming in September, 2010.

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?