This week, XbitLabs.com ran an informative piece called “Intel: The World Needs Itanium, So Do We.” Fresh off an interview with Intel Spokesman Pat Ward, Anton Shilov delivered an interesting perspective about Itanium, Xeon, and the launch of the new Knights Corner chip. He attributes the following quote to Pat:
ASSET InterTech, a leading supplier of open tools for embedded instrumentation for design validation, test and debug, announced that it is the first third-party platform with validation and test tools for the newly announced families of Intel® server processors, the Intel Xeon® 5600 and 7500 series, and the Itanium® 9300 series.
ASSET’s ScanWorks platform capitalizes on Intel’s embedded instrumentation strategy, which centers on that company’s Interconnect Built-In Self Test (IBIST) technology. Intel has been embedding IBIST into its leading processors and chip sets while ScanWorks has provided a comprehensive validation and test solution for Intel-based designs and their high-speed input/output (I/O) buses, including Intel® QuickPath Interconnect (Intel® QPI), PCI Express (PCIe), Direct Memory Interface (DMI) and Double Data Rate memory, third generation (DDR3).
Tim Caffee, ASSET’s vice president of design validation, said “As Intel increases the capabilities of the Xeon and Itanium processor families and pushes the outer edge of the performance envelope in the server, workstation and high-performance computing (HPC) market, tools to quickly validate and test new design platforms become increasingly critical. It’s always a race for equipment manufacturers to get to market before the competition with servers based on new processors. Effective validation tools like ScanWorks are imperative to do this.”
Itanium Solutions Alliance member, Insyde Software, has announced that its flagship product InsydeH2O supports, and is shipping on its customers’ latest and most advanced Itanium and Xeon platforms from the Intel.
Insyde certainly has not wasted any time in taking advantage of the commonality between the Itanium and Xeon lines. These processors share several platform ingredients, including the Intel QuickPath Interconnect, the Intel Scalable Memory Interconnect, the Intel 7500 Scalable Memory Buffer, and the I/O hub (Intel 7500 chipset), and these features allow companies like Insyde to develop features more quickly for a wider variety of mission-critical, enterprise, data center and volume server customer designs.
Insyde Software has long been a pioneer in providing firmware and engineering services in the server industry. The company was first-to-market with UEFI-based BIOS in support of the Intel Itanium server platform in 2005 and today is proud to call leading server manufacturers such as Bull, Egenera, Inspur, NEC, SGI, and Supermicro, among numerous others, as its customers.
Last month, Insyde co-presented a technical session at the Intel Developer Forum in Beijing with its customer and leading China-based server vendor, Inspur. The session covered UEFI server firmware advancements in support of large-scale server systems.
Today at the HP Tecnology@Work 2010 event in Germany, Joachim Aertebjerg & Rory McInerney of Intel will be leading the following break-out session: “BB-62 - Intel: Scalable Xeon and Itanium based servers in Mission-Critical data centres”. This session will review Intel strategy & building blocks for mission-critical server infrastructure and present leadership product development built into the Itanium processor family. Click here for more information on HP Tech@Work 2010.
The Itanium architecture is known as a solid platform for data center consolidation projects and also for being a trusted foundation for mission-critical ERP applications. Two recent articles from Express Computer in India describe how two companies migrated their data center from x86 to Itanium-based systems.
Chambal Fertilisers and Chemicals Limited, (CFCL)’s IT landscape consisted of disparate IT systems with standalone x86 servers running discrete homegrown applications spread across regional offices to manage its in-house financial and transactional systems. These standalone x86 servers, running at various utilization rates, had performance issues whenever the production demand was high. CFCL’s manufacturing plant servers ran commercial and other core applications alongside niche applications on x86 servers, making it difficult to consolidate data. “It was a case of too many servers, too many applications, and too much customization—leading to increased spending on maintenance,” said V S Rao, Manager–IT, CFCL. CFCL decided to mitigate unexpected risks through the installation of HP Integrity servers fitted with dual-core Intel Itanium processors and running HP-UX 11i v2 to ensure high availability and simpler management. Read the entire article here.
Amalgamated Bean Coffee Trading Company Limited (Café Coffee Day) is a fully integrated coffee company that manages growing, harvesting, roasting, blending, exporting and retailing of coffee. To manage its growing, multi-faceted and geographically dispersed business, the company realized it needed an integrated solution to handle production and supply chain management. This new ERP environment would be critical to the smooth running of its business, and the company placed great emphasis on selecting the best platform to run its SAP software to ensure the highest possible levels of protection for its ERP environment. Café Coffee Day uses SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Priority Support for SAP Applications. The company also worked with PSI Data System to handle the migration from the original Intel Xeon-based platform to an Itanium-based platform. Read the entire article here.
