The Itanium Solutions Blog

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.

According to a recent article in eWeek, HP is busy creating a Converged Infrastructure Architecture that relies heavily on the company’s own technology.

David Donatelli, executive vice president of HP’s Enterprise Servers and Networking, and Paul Miller, vice president of marketing for HP’s Enterprise Storage and Servers unit, believe a key problem converged networks are trying to solve is IT sprawl in data centers, which is leads to about 66 percent of tech budgets being spent on maintenance and operations, with only 34 percent left over for innovation.

Included in the convergence plan is the HP FlexFabric, a single virtualized networking fabric that can connect thousands of servers and storage devices on demand. FlexFabric converges the benefits of HP’s ProCurve and Virtual Connect products.

FlexFabric works with HP’s x86 blade servers and the company’s Integrity and Nonstop blades powered by Itanium.

Read the complete article from eWeek for more details.

A blog post today from the CEO of SGI, Mark Barrenechea, made some significant and assertive statements regarding their line of Itanium servers, roadmap, and aspects of a common architecture.

Read his FLOPS:

“SGI Altix Itanium systems power some of the most important systems in the world - from conducting global warming research to fraud detection to homeland security. Itanium offers unique value in RAS (reliability, availability, serviceability) and memory addressability unmatched by any other non-strictly-proprietary microprocessor. We expect to continue to sell SGI Altix Itanium for many years to come.”

“[Ultraviolet] represents the next generation of Altix, designed to utilize both Itanium and Xeon processors.”

“As Intel continues to deliver its QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) technologies, we believe we can continue to develop a common architecture to address both Xeon and Itanium processors.”

Read the full post

There are always good conversations going on over at the Intel Server Room. This one, in which the question “Xeon or Itanium?” is posed and discussed, is of particular interest.