Itanium Solutions Guide Mission Critical Computing Blog

Itanium Powers Billing Services for Electricity Provider MESDCL

2008-10-29T12:47:00-08:00

For the electricity industry in India, managing customers is all about power and availability.

Yes, handling the ever-increasing energy production and distribution demands in a rapidly growing economy is a challenge, indeed. Along with that, however, comes a sometimes less discussed but no less critical problem: how to handle the explosive growth in IT infrastructure to manage the growing volume and complexity of its customer base.

In Maharashtra, the country’s third largest state in area and home of its largest city (Mumbai), this problem is massive. The good news is that business is booming, with over 15% of the India’s industrial output produced in this region and the state boasting India’s highest per capital income as well.

Power consumption itself is putting major strains on the region in many ways, as demand currently exceeds supply on a regular basis, and management of customer issues is also growing at a staggering rate. But thanks to Itanium and HP, Maharashtra Electricity State Distribution Company Ltd. (MESDCL) has found a way to handle both current IT demands more effectively and to establish a system with built-in capacity for expansion.

Every month MESDCL handles 15 million customers and the expected growth rate is at least 500,000 new customers to be added every year. Its annual revenues are currently just under $5 billion (U.S.), and the company itself has over 75,000 employees. To support its substantial client base MESDCL had originally written its billing system in Cobol, a workable system for a time but with significant limitations on managing large data arrays.

As capacity demands began to build significantly in the 1990s, MESDC realized it needed to replace its older software solution with a more modern one based on Oracle, which it completed in 2000. Although that helped, as customer growth continued MESDC quickly realized the hardware part of the solution also badly needed upgrading.

As just one example, MESDCL’s existing PA-RISC system, even with the power of Oracle behind it, took as much as 24 hours just to process 10,000 bills. There were other issues as well, including the need to handle a unique photo-based approach to recording electrical meter readings, something that added even more data management problems and was completely unmanageable within the existing IT environment.

MESDCL needed a system with much faster overall response times, lower IT costs that would scale even more efficiently as customer demand grew, and dramatically improved productivity on a grand scale.

Their final solution, which involved a complete re-engineering of their IT infrastructure (including a new picture-processing capability for the photo-based meter readings), used 12 HP Integrity rx3600 servers and 10 HP Integrity rx6600 servers, all driven by dual-core Itanium microprocessors.

With this solution in place, MESDCL has seen its billing processing time for those 10,000 bills drop from 24 hours to only one hour. In addition, because of the increased processing speed, MESDCL was able to roll out its new photo-based meter reading systems for approximately half of its 15 million customers – in the first six months of system deployment.

The solution also offers a far more energy-efficient hardware environment than before, along with a less costly IT support environment as well. Both will provide MESDCL with the “power” to scale their mission-critical computing needs for many years to come.

Why Server Sales Are Doing Surprisingly Well in a Challenging Economy

2008-10-01T10:32:00-08:00

With the economic problems around the world right now, you might wonder how that is affecting the IT industry -- and the server market in particular. Would companies retrench and hold back on spending? The answer is that, with results counted from the first six months of an admittedly challenging 2008, the server business is apparently doing quite well. And Itanium fared well, too -- with results that may suggest some of what is happening behind the scenes.

The results, which were summarized in a recent survey released by Gartner, Inc., include an interesting statistic: that worldwide server shipments in Q2 2008 were up 12.2 percent over the same quarter last year. Revenues were up as well, but by a smaller amount, 5.7%. This more-than-reasonable performance in a tough economic climate was driven by a combination of a “continued upswing in x86 server replacements” plus “Web center build outs” and growth in emerging markets.

That refers to the entire market, but how did Itanium fare in the same period? From one respect, raw shipments, not as well, with Gartner reporting that “RISC-Itanium Unix Servers” saw a 7.9 percent drop from the same quarter a year earlier. However, revenues for this server category were growing at a rate of 9.4%. As Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice-president of Gartner said, this indicated “that higher-end systems were the hardware platforms that drove sales in this space.”

One conclusion behind all this is that, even in a tough economy, IT executives continue to make the decision to upgrade their systems to increase productivity through performance improvements, higher availability and lower cost-of-ownership. Good tactics, under the circumstances.

The investment in higher-end Itanium systems at a considerably higher rate than in previous years suggests a more strategic move is also taking place as well. With major enhancements introduced for Itanium this year with emphasis on Virtualization, plus a number of developments that make Itanium-based server solutions more dynamically configurable on the fly, my guess is that you are also seeing an increased rate of server consolidation for companies that can afford to do so. All of which positions those companies even better when the overall economy begins its upswing, hopefully sometime in the near future.

Not a bad strategy, and the revenues are high enough to suggest that far more than just a few good companies are making this change. It is something for all IT organizations out there to consider as the economy continues to navigate the current doldrums and charts a course for a stronger recovery path ahead.

So stay tuned. My guess is that data for the third quarter will show even more of this trend.

Sophos Secures Your Itanium-based Linux Future

2008-07-30T00:00:00-08:00

The Itanium Solutions Alliance recently announced it reached agreement with Sophos (www.sophos.com), a leading provider of enterprise solutions for IT security and control, to provide a new level of support for Itanium systems running on Linux.

Sophos already supports HP-UX, OpenVMS and Windows (including the recently-released Windows Server 2008) on Itanium-based systems, but with a new release of Sophos Anti-Virus coming in Q4 2008, it will now support Itanium-based systems running Red Hat EL 4.x and Red Hat EL 5.x versions of Linux.

Along with the continuing growth of Linux for mission-critical enterprise applications is, unfortunately, a parallel growth in the attacks on such systems with advanced computer viruses and malware. So the porting of Sophos Anti-Virus to support the latest Red Hat Enterprise Linux editions for Itanium is welcome news indeed.

Sophos' approach to its Enterprise Security products is highly-regarded worldwide and with good reason. One of the keys to this is a unique approach to what they refer to as "Behavioral Genotype Protection"® and run-time protection algorithms. These systems track not only the presence of known viruses and malware but also their artifacts as well -- in registry changes and other data log alterations, all with the end result of identifying the presence of such dangers as early as possible.

Like other companies providing antivirus software, Sophos delivers proven algorithms to identify, quickly disable, and quarantine antivirus threats. But where they are different is their extensive focus on enterprise systems. They understand the importance of providing powerful control tools for setting up and managing the overall IT end-to-end security infrastructure, including centralized installation services, malware alerting mechanisms, and advanced security software appliances to monitor web gateways to your system in real-time.

The combination of these tools is a sophisticated approach to isolating both known and new malware and system threats at their earliest emergence. The tools are accurate, thorough, and run quickly with minimal IT overhead.

Add to this that the new offerings Sophos will provide are some of the most powerful and extensive anti-virus solutions for Itanium-based systems running on Linux, and you have a compelling product any of you Itanium Linux Users out there should be considering.

Watch for it in Q4 2008.

Congratulations to the 2008 Innovation Award winners!

2008-07-21T00:00:00-08:00

We recently announced the three category winners of the 2008 Itanium Solutions Alliance Innovation Awards and we're impressed by the results that that have been able to achieve using Itanium-based technology. We had a large number of entries in all categories from around the world showing how Itanium-based solutions are making a huge impact in a variety of areas. It was very challenging to pick a winner in each of the categories. But we did and the winners are...

In the category of Humanitarian Impact Innovation; The University of Houston

Researchers at the University of Houston Bioinformatics Laboratory developed an application running on Itanium-based systems to computationally identify and monitor microbial genetic diversity using the latest advances in genomic sequencing technology and high performance computing. Drs. Yuriy Fofanov and Lennart Johnsson are tackling these challenges by focusing on how microorganisms are impacted by global warming, human activities and toxic waste.

In the category of Entrepreneurial Innovation; S7 Software Solutions

This firm based in Bangalore ported more than 2 million lines of software code and developed new instruction sets for a Fortune 100 company's transaction processing system, which includes mortgage loans and other financial service products. The update helped the client keep pace with the competition by offering a more stable processing environment and faster transaction response times.

In the category of Enterprise Business Applications; Protégésoft

This Singaporean company replaced its outdated and cumbersome legacy mainframe system with Intel Itanium architecture to take advantage of Itanium's availability features. Their Financial Portfolio Builder on Itanium-based systems was a tool that helped their investment banking clients achieve annualized portfolio returns of more than 22 percent with an efficiency of almost 30,000 times faster than their previous methodology. Most impressively, the solution reduced training time from 6 months to a half day and helped increase transactions from 2 to 58,000! (Yes, we mean 2 to 58,000...or an increase of nearly 3 million percent!)

On behalf of the entire Alliance, we wish all of these companies the very best!

Amadeus� Technology Helps Travelers Look Before They Book

2008-07-15T00:00:00-08:00

It is now prime vacation time for many and travel planning is at its peak. When you make your plans, it's very possible you'll be making your reservations via an Itanium-based solution.

Whether you book online, by phone, or in person, there are generally two parts to the system: an online booking engine and a company which provides the connection between that booking system and the travel providers. That second part of the system is called a Global Distribution System.

The largest global processor of these travel transactions is Amadeus Global Travel Distribution S.A., which supports more than 94,000 travel agency locations and 32,000+ airline sales offices in hundreds of countries and territories. To do so, they must manage 500 million travel bookings per year, through connections to 95% of all scheduled airlines, 22 car rental companies serving 36,000 locations, nearly 77,000 hotels, and 17 cruise lines.

On a daily basis, Amadeus handles nearly 300 million transactions of all kinds and up to 2 million internet-based bookings at their Erding, Germany data center, one of the largest civilian data centers in the world. With price competition becoming incredibly fierce, Amadeus' Fare Quote system is in high demand. This allows customers to compare prices based on different carriers, routes, and dates before booking. How do they make this happen? At the core of their system is a growing server farm with 59 HP Integrity rx8620 servers, each of which are equipped with 16 Intel Itanium processors, running SUSE Linux and Amadeus' Altéa reservation system. Thanks to extensive Amadeus-exclusive IT infrastructure innovations, SUSE, and the Itanium-based systems, they are able to handle more than 5,500 consumer requests per second during peak hours. The system actually takes less than one third of a second to process data inquiries and completes each fare search within five seconds.

All of this processing is an incredibly complex task. For example, when a customer is searching for the lowest airfare possible, the Amadeus solution can produce more than 200 low-fare options per query. These options have to be accurate, timely, and structured so customers can easily navigate options based on changing dates, switching airlines and airports, and even reconsidering destinations. This means providing many millions of instructions to the server system per query.
These demands make system response time, rapid reallocation and scalability critical elements to the server system.

Fortunately, for Amadeus, and probably you if you're booking your next trip online, all of these computing needs are met with Itanium-based systems.

The Power of Partnership

2008-06-02T00:00:00-08:00

This collaboration continues to bear fruit in many ways.

At its simplest level, the companies provide the many building blocks of hardware platforms (too many to mention), OS choices (from Linux to customized Unix to Windows), and mission-critical enterprise applications for financial and customer management (and others).

Another way is through careful coordination by multiple partners to optimize a solution to best benefit a customer. Great examples of this include:

The Scottish Life Division of Royal London Group migrated more than ten million lines of code and nearly a billion data records to a new Itanium-based system, thanks to the leadership of MSS International, a system migration specialist, MicroFocus Studio and Server for legacy applications issues, HP for its HP Integrity, HP 9000, StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array Systems, and HP OpenView, and Oracle with its 9i Database, Application Server, Oracle Management Pack, and Oracle Data Guard. The end result improved batch job run times by one-third and cut the total cost of ownership by 50%.

Kindred Healthcare responding to its ten-fold increase of database size over eight years (to two Terabytes) by moving to an Itanium-based platform resulting from the combined efforts of HP with its Integrity rx7620 and rx4640 servers, SAP with its mySAP ERP 2005 solution, Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2000, and other custom enhancements. Online user response time was improved from 1.3 to 8.0 times (depending on the application and number of users); report generation improved by more than two times; and batch processing was 24%faster.

A third way is through the rapid development and deployment of specific new applications which leverage the latest advancements by other Alliance members. Some of the recent enhancements involve Intel Virtualization Technology for the Itanium architecture at the hardware level itself and are now being fully supported by Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 and NEC, Fujitsu, Hitachi, and HP, among others.

Finally, a conscious team-oriented collaboration helps produce innovative and breakthrough products. One of the best examples is the recently announced Itanium-based solution featuring dynamic partitioning, full hot-adding of processors, memory, and I/O host bridges for Windows Server 2008.

Ultimately the partnership between Itanium Solutions Alliance members and you is probably the most important. It's those relationships between you and your providers that are the links between what you want to achieve with your computing and how you'll achieve those goals. Dr. Carlos Simmerling of Stony Brook University, the winner of the Alliance's Humanitarian award in 2007, discussed that a key reason why his biomedical research modeling performed so well was due to hands-on application and integration support from Alliance Founder SGI. SGI's team offered valuable insight which helped his application run as quickly as possible. Thanks to the collaboration between SGI and Dr. Simmerling's team's efforts in the modeling area, we may be significantly closer to a cure for HIV.

Sometimes we need to take a step back to recognize how important teamwork is in today's computing world. Indeed, how vital are the individual players in your computing environments vs. a collaborative approach? Do you trust your IT decisions to someone outside your department or are you picking and choosing the players for your own "Dream Team"? What do you expect to gain from working with a community of hardware and software vendors?

Yes, You Can: Dynamic Hardware Partitioning Is Now a Reality

2008-04-23T00:00:00-08:00

A recent press release sent some shockwaves through the IT user community. Now, thanks to the collaboration and innovation of mission-critical computing giants NEC, Intel and Microsoft, the first servers with on-the-fly, dynamic partitioning capability was introduced: the NEC Express5800/1320Xf.

Before we get into how it works, let's be clear on what this means to you. With the NEC Express5800/1320Xf server you can hot add and hot replace processors and memory in your server on demand - without having to stop any of your applications. So if you need more processing capacity on short notice, or if you need to quickly replace failed modules, you can do this without impacting your user community.

It kicks the whole idea of "high availability" up to an entirely new level.

For Microsoft, the recent releases of Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 were critical to making this happen. The new edition of Windows Server, a major upgrade from the 2003 edition, now supports hot adding of processors, memory, and I/O host bridges, plus hot replacement of processors and memory. SQL Server 2008, with its new "Resource Governor" feature, allows real-time management and allocation of "application resource pools" to keep your database applications running at optimum performance, regardless of peak system demands.

This only works on systems using x64 and Itanium processors, but for good reason.

Intel recently introduced a number of new high-availability features in their Itanium 9100 series processors, including the new Demand-Based Switching feature, which allows dynamic allocation of processor power as needed. Add to this to the 9100's new Core Level Lock-Step feature which allows the dual-core processors to automatically mirror the operations of one core by the other core, plus the existing Socket-Level Lock-Step, Enhanced Machine Check, Intel Cache Safe, and Advanced Error Detection and Correction technology, and you have a very powerful combination of improved features for NEC and Microsoft to use to full advantage in this new release.

We capitalize on all this using our own unique, cellular-based hardware architecture, allowing for dynamic logical reconfiguration of the Itanium processor and memory partitions, a proprietary approach to error correction and error management, very large cache architectures, and a critical "dedicated cache coherency interface," as they describe the linkage between data caches. Our new server also supports partitioning approaches that allow multiple Operating Systems to work independently of each other simultaneously. It also uses cross-bar architecture to allow real-time rapid reconfiguration of hardware cells and I/O bridges on demand.

As all of us know, IT organizations have been working hard to consolidate servers into fewer, more powerful systems. The upside of this has been a dramatic increase in cost savings for the enterprise. The challenge is trying to achieve this with the expected high level of availability that today's computing business demand. So when a product can dynamically reallocate system usage to support unexpected rapid surges in demand -- or in response to localized system failures - it's going to generate quite a bit of attention. Microsoft describes their recent innovations as "bringing the mainframe to the mainstream."

For more on this, check out this paper which takes an in-depth look at the Dynamic Hardware Partitioning issue.

Mark Twain, Rumors and the Next Big Thing

2008-04-03T00:00:00-08:00

My observations are not just based on data; when I joined the Alliance as Executive Director, I embarked on my own "listening tour" to get a better read on what those closest to Itanium are thinking. I've been traveling and speaking with Alliance members around the globe about the vision of our organization, as well as the ecosphere of mission-critical computing. The feedback and resounding support that I hear from Alliance founders is clear wherever I go: Itanium is here to stay and the future is bright.

Just recently, the tech industry saw an announcement that touted SASs certification of its programs running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM System z mainframes. IBM even called this a renaissance of the mainframe.

It seems like an interesting development when you take into account that Itanium-based system users have had the ability to run these and many other solutions for some time now - and without the constraints and budgetary spending of a mainframe environment,.

Since this is old news to Itanium users, just think of how Tukwila will advance this area even more and benefit enterprises of tomorrow!

While you're here, check out the most recent Alliance podcast with Transitive, which discusses Solaris/SPARC applications on Itanium-systems running Linux. It's a good interview with an interesting member company and just shows again the flexibility of Itanium-based systems in a real-life environment.

In my talks with member companies and industry leaders, one thing rings true: there's something big on the horizon of datacenter technology. Some think it'll be another big breakthrough in virtualization, others say lessened power consumption. I've got my ideas (as you'll be seeing in blogs to come), but I want to know your thoughts.

Drop me a line and let me know what you think the "next big thing" in computing will be!

Tukwila: The World�s First 2 billion Transistor Microprocessor

2008-03-04T00:00:00-08:00

At ISSCC in San Francisco in February, Intel unveiled many of the much-anticipated details behind Tukwila, the next generation Itanium microprocessor, which is the world's first processor with more than 2 billion transistors. Tukwila is slated for release in late 2008.

Tukwila features an innovative Quad-Core architecture and is designed to run at a frequency of up to 2 GHz which will deliver more than twice the performance of the current Intel Dual-Core Itanium Processor 9100 series released in Q4 '07. The Itanium architecture's Explicitly Parallel Instruction Code (EPIC) technology is designed to be extremely efficient. It runs at relatively low frequencies and yet, accomplishes a tremendous amount during each clock cycle. This means it requires less power than most legacy RISC architecture, which requires much higher frequencies (and more electricity) to do equivalent work.

Along with the higher frequency, the increased performance of Tukwila is achieved via Intel's new QuickPath interconnect technology, which is designed to work with the high-speed integrated memory controller. With this capacity for dramatic speed increase, you'll see Intel QuickPath rolled out across several Intel server products, including the Xeon processor family. Stay tuned for more details later in 2008.

Tukwila also increases the on-die cache memory to 30 MB, up from the 9100 series maximum of 24 MB. With instruction sets and software applications tuned to take advantage of this 25% cache increase, this will further amplify the effective computing speed of Tukwila-based systems. Large, well-threaded applications like databases, ERP and business analytic apps that take advantage of large cache sizes should see a sizable speed-up in performance.

Tukwila's significant performance jump requires only a 25% percent increase in energy consumption. This is still a positive impact on energy efficiency because when you factor in the increased chip speed and the need to drive 2 billion transistors, the amount of energy required to deliver the same amount of computing power is actually 38% less than with the 9100 microprocessor series. Ultimately the total performance per watt achieved by Tukwila-based systems will depend on the server hardware designs and configurations, including equipped memory, disk drives, as well as built-in redundancies that are common to high-end servers, like extra power supplies, fans, etc. Nonetheless, it does appear that Tukwila-equipped servers will be able to do more work while consuming less power overall, especially when the systems are populated with multiple processors.

Tukwila also includes yet another important new RAS feature called Double Device Data Correction (DDDC). This is an important new reliability feature which allows a memory DIMM to keep running even when there are two sequential DRAM device hard-errors on a DIMM. Past solutions could only handle a single device memory hard error, but the Tukwila solution, with support for both single and double error recovery, improves system availability and reduces the need for DIMM replacements in the future. This is significant for Itanium-based solutions, since they frequently take advantage of large amounts of memory; the return on the RAS investment is multiplied several times over.

Of course, Tukwila will include all the features and technologies delivered on earlier product versions, including Core Level Lock-Step (CLL) and "Demand-Based Switching" (DBS) technologies, introduced in the Itanium 9100 series (code name Montvale). CLL, a feature you might find in a mainframe, allows automatic mirroring of each core by another core, to ensure data integrity and system availability in the presence of point failures. DBS switches microprocessor power on or off as workloads change, effectively making these chips even more energy efficient, especially when the processor is idling, waiting to perform work.

And yes, it also includes the unique Intel Virtualization Technology (IVT), which makes it even easier for IT shops to implement consolidation projects. IVT also helps IT achieve efficient load balancing, disaster recovery and rapid deployment of applications and server images on a wide range of virtual machines.

Tukwila, Intel's seventh and latest generation of Itanium product, is expected to ship in late 2008. Check with your Itanium Solutions Alliance founding sponsor for details on when their first systems will ship.

Earning the �Title� of High Availability in Mission-Critical Computing

2008-02-22T00:00:00-08:00

One surprising aspect of the home market is that one company, First American Title, manages more-than 25 percent of the title insurance business in the United States. With products such as title insurance, property information, specialty insurance, mortgage information, and their First Advantage business solutions subsidiary, First American supports millions of Americans every year, through at least one of its corporate brands. It closed fiscal year 2006 with over $8.5 billion in sales, up from $6.7 billion in 2004 -- showing strong growth.

To make that happen needed rapid access to property data, loan information, ownership records, and the highest-performing Business Intelligence (BI), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems in the business. With a 1.7 terabyte database and as many as 15,000 daily users in more than 1,300 offices requiring access to the same data, they needed a system with the highest performance and availability to maintain the highest responsiveness in this critical business environment. To meet these mission-critical needs, they turned to a solution built around the Intel® Itanium processor which offered several advantages that support high availability for this kind of business environment:

A key aspect of support is redundancy in the systems architecture, something supported in the past for this type of application by deploying cluster-based solutions. Unfortunately most of today's data warehouse, BI, CRM, Supply Chain Management (SCM), and ERP applications do not scale well across multiple servers, so clustering is not an option - even if there weren't other drawbacks to these kind of solutions as well. Solutions which support ease of scaling by adding more processors, adding memory, and installing additional I/O capability, make it easy to build a redundant, single system able to grow as computing needs do.

Intel® Virtualization technology, another key benefit, allows the system to optimize the utilization of each processor and manage system availability on demand by using physical partitions, virtual partitions and OS virtualization

First American's earlier solutions had more than 50 title and escrow systems and business processes running differently across the company, and evaluated some of its critical data manually, which causedup to a four-week delay in information delay. This contributed to difficulty in rolling out new products as needed.

They initially upgraded to an Intel server with 8 Intel Xeon® processors (later expanding to 32), but this was still not enough. By finally moving to an HP Integrity Superdome®, they were able to consolidate all applications in a single system - and improve performance at the same time.

Once the system was up and operational, First American saw an immediate 20 percent improvement in online response times. Further, because of the high system availability the company learned to rely even more on it, by standardizing processes and centralizing back-office production work, both in the title and escrow areas. As a result, not only has First American been able to grow its market through better deployment of services, more tightly-managed enterprise reporting, and more rapid creation of new products, it has also seen an estimated around $50 million a year -- because of the ability to consolidate in a single highly-scalable system.

All in all, the First American story is played out around the globe. Are your systems in need of an availability upgrade? When you're operating in today's always-on business world the ability to access and manipulate data in real-time can mean the difference between success and failure. Why not stack your deck with a system known for its high levels of availability?

Grid Virtualization and Itanium�-based Solutions

2008-01-30T00:00:00-08:00

NextAxiom®, a member of the Itanium® Solutions Alliance, has taken this concept to the next level by leveraging the power of Intel® Itanium® processor solutions with what are now broadly known as Virtualized Service Grids.

Great. But how does this work? In a 2007 case study, NextAxiom's founder and CEO Ash Massoudi noted that the idea goes beyond the concept of service oriented architecture (SOA) and the use of standard web-based service systems, which commonly rely on service operations to communicate from system to system. Instead, NextAxiom replaces this with what they call "Service Oriented Programming," or SOP. Using SOP, the key concept is to create an "in-memory" image of services that run an entire application transparently without an IT department having to deploy a complex web of SOA middleware or load-balancing solutions to make the optimum use of the virtualized grid. The application runs on a Service Virtual Machine, then automatically (through NextAxiom's Hyperservice business platform) layers it across the virtual grid, allocates resources, and distributes the computing load transparently to you, the user.

It's a perfect match for an Itanium-based solution, because, as Massoudi noted in an interview last year, "multi-core processor architectures like the Dual-Core Intel Itanium processor provide the most cost-effective and efficient foundation for Virtualized Service Grids". Add to that the built-in virtualization features of Intel Itanium processors, with its raw computing power and scalability, and you have a virtualization solution unmatched for this kind of application.

How does it work in practice? As noted in a case study available on this site, NextAxiom's Hyperservice Studio allows users to simply drag and drop services, add visual programming elements, and then link them together. The software then automatically creates the service program from this design and applies it over the virtualized grid as needed, with little to no intervention from the application developer. Where feasible, programs are automatically parallelized and distributed across multiple platforms as needed. New services can be added or removed on-demand.

One major user of this solution is Ventyxtm, whose Service Delivery Management Solution (SDM) uses NextAxiom's SOA-based platform, running on a parallel HPC system using HP Integrity rx6600 servers, powered by four Dual-Core Intel® Itanium 2 processors and 96 GB of RAM.

How do you know if these new SO-based platforms are what you're looking for? If you're running service-oriented solutions with high-volume needs, you should consider this option. Grid computing and virtualized service applications have definitely come into their own.

Feeling Insecure about your DNS server? Try SourceT from Secure64

2007-12-10T00:00:00-08:00

Threats such as the UDP (for User Datagram Protocol) sessionless networking protocol "flood" attacks, in which a large number of UDP packets are sent to random ports in an attempt to break into a system, have joined TCP SYN attacks (in which a sender sends a large volume of connections that cannot be completed because of sheer numbers) as some of the most serious such concerns to today's mission-critical DNS servers.

There is not a perfect solution to protect systems from such external assaults. However, the SourceT micro operating system solution from Secure64 comes very close. Secure64 is an Itanium Solutions Alliance member and software company that combines a novel and brilliant software architecture approach of its own with the Itanium® processor's unique security features.

How does it work? At the system level, Secure64 starts by incorporating a fully authenticated boot process, so that the software that launches when a system is brought up is exactly what is expected. Special cryptography features in the SourceT micro OS automatically check that the system software has not been compromised.

Next, unlike many systems where there is a tremendous amount of code operating at the highest levels of "privilege" (which control everything from I/O drivers to memory addressability), Secure64 keeps this code base very small -- less than 10,000 lines of code. Keeping the code base small makes it both easier to protect and harder to attack.

Secure64 also pays careful attention to the structure and nature of authenticating calls that allow system hardware modifications to take place. Special crypto keys are integrated in multiple locations to prevent unauthorized users from entering the system.

The system is designed to eliminate the possibility of allowing "code injection" into the system from outside intruders by providing a special "secured runtime environment" that isolates memory from access by unauthorized code. This blocks unauthorized code from reading or writing any executable images.

And finally, there are tight controls on how system administrators are authenticated.

In building such a system, Secure64 leverages not only the speed of the Itanium processor, something that is critical when "overhead" functions such as security must be managed, but also several security features that are unique to the Itanium processor. Bill Worley, Secure64's CTO, described the most important of these in the Itanium Solutions Podcast interview Spring 2007 where he highlighted the following critical and important areas:

A "Protection Key" -- The Itanium processor allows a unique 24-bit value to be assigned to any subset of pages required, as a "key" to be tested when an outside agent wishes to access and/or modify those pages. If an outside agent submits such a "key" when attempting to access that data -- and it matches the preassigned key stored as part of the machine control state -- then it can access those pages. If the key doesn't match, the agent is blocked. This unique Itanium processor feature effectively enables a degree of memory compartmentalization unmatched by other approaches.

An ability to authorize access to memory with a wide variety of combinations of read/write privileges. This provides a very powerful approach to Authenticating calls from outside the system.

A unique "Register Save Engine", which puts sensitive control information where no outside agent can touch it.

How does the SourceT solution perform in practice? In a test conducted by Secure64, a test DNS application running on the SourceT OS processed 102,000 queries/second -- a great accomplishment in itself. However, when the same system was subjected to a 200,000 packet/second UDP reflected flood attack; SourceT was able to handle 96,000 queries per second successfully. And in a TCP SYN flood of 40,000 packets/second, SourceT was able to respond to 95,000 queries per second, only a 1% degradation.

It's a great example of how the unique architecture of Itanium processors -- in the hands of Secure64's innovative software architects -- can enable technology breakthroughs not even imagined in the past.

You can learn more by visiting Secure64's website at www.secure64.com.

The Dual-Core Intel� Itanium� 9100 Series Microprocessors

2007-11-20T00:00:00-08:00

Yes, there is a speed increase -- 1.66 GHz versus the current Itanium® (Montecito) processor family's 1.60 GHz. There's a new and faster 667 MHz Front Side Bus (FSB) as well, all operating at 104 W power consumption. That, combined with a three-load bus (with two processors and a chipset on the same bus), means an important speed increase.

As a result, though the clock rate had a gradual increase, a recent benchmark test on the SPECfp_rate_base2006 comparing otherwise identical computing platforms noted that the system using Itanium® 9150 processor demonstrated an 11% performance gain compared to the Itanium® 9050 processor-based solution. And running the STAR-CD test (v3.26 "A Class" workload), there was a 19% performance gain from the 9050 series-based solution to an identical platform using the 9150 processor.

Nobody's going to turn down a speed increase but for many it may the other features in this release that will mean even more.

The first of these is Intel's® "Core Level Lock-Step", a key new reliability feature that supports improved data integrity and the ability to run applications faster. The concept, at its simplest, is the ability of the Dual-Core Processor architecture to have one of the Cores automatically mirror the operations of the other Core. They run in "lock-step" as needed, either to support even higher levels of data accuracy while running mission-critical applications for business, or to allow parallel "lock-step" processing of applications.

In previous incarnations of the Itanium processor, this type of function was only available with their "Socket-Level Lockstep" feature, which allowed a processor in one socket to mirror the operations of another. With "Core Level Lock-Step" added to the mix, operations can be mirrored within the same Dual-Core Chip. Plus the existing "Enhanced Machine Check Architecture" (enabling machine availability on a very high level), Intel® Cache Safe Technology (that automatically disables cache lines when a cache error is noted), and Advanced Error Detection and Correction Architecture, means that data is even safer than ever before with the 9100 series processors in place. These features help the comfort level when it comes to centralizing operations, a key step in cutting operations costs for the future.

A second important feature is Demand Based Switching (DBS). Just as high-end automobile designs "switch off" several of the cylinders in the engine in certain instances to conserve gas, the innovative DBS feature works with the operating system to allow minimizing processor energy consumption as workloads vary.

All the other features you've expected are still there, of course, including "built-in, silicon-level support for virtualization" using Intel's Virtualization Technology, a key to consolidating mission-critical applications in centralized operations.

There's also, of course, the strong -- and unique -- special security features of the Itanium processor family, including hardware authentication of firmware during system bootup, a unique approach to memory compartmentalization (to protect against foreign code infiltrating the system), and fast data encryption (without sacrificing system performance).

The 9100 series processor family includes models all the way up to its high-end 9150M device (with 1.66 GHz processor, 667 MHz FSB, Hyper-Threading technology, and all the other features discussed above). All the Itanium Solutions Alliance Server manufacturers, including Bull, Fujitsu, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, HP, Hitachi, Intel, NEC, SGI, and Unisys, will be launching new Dual-Core Intel Itanium Processor 9100 series-based products soon. So if you want to learn more, check with one of them and they'll be able to advise you on how best to put these powerful innovations to use.

And yes, if you're wondering, Intel is continuing its aggressive Itanium® processor innovation path. The next model, code-named Tukwila, is projected for release at the end of 2008 and will feature a Quad-Core design, twice the performance of today's Dual-Core Intel Itanium processors. It will also incorporate large, on-die caches, integrated memory controllers, a faster interconnect architecture, and several new RAS and virtualization features. Beyond that, the next version is "Poulson", which Intel describes as a "many-core" processor built on their 32 nanometer process technology, which will allow manufacturing as high as 4X the transistor density in Tukwila.

There are more great things coming from Intel, the Itanium Solutions Alliance and its partners in the months and years to come!

Cutting through the Fog of Financial Transparency

2007-10-30T10:09:00-08:00

Between the U.S. Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Basel II accords covering international banking regulations, the Patriot Act, and a variety of other national, regional, and local requirements, corporations face truly staggering financial reporting and compliance laws.

It is all for good reasons, of course. Many of the laws, at the basic level at least, are about ensuring transparency of financial transactions, something that corporations strive to do so that stakeholders are served honestly and effectively. Other regulations, such as the Basel II accords, are designed to avoid problems that can start in one institution and then spread quickly to others in the global financial network. A third type of legislation is designed to prevent money laundering. In all cases, such laws are here to support and protect everyone: employees, shareholders, strategic partners, and even the general public.
The problem is that modern corporations face formal reporting requirements and the evolving nature of both the laws and the businesses they are designed to regulate, and the growing complexity of keeping up with the changes. As businesses grow, so does the amount of data they must track. Additionally, companies also want to mine and manage their own data for internal uses to better understand customer needs and product effectiveness. Overall, this is a challenging and ongoing problem.

Here are a few examples of what this has meant for specific companies:

Scottish Life, a major U.K. pension provider and part of the Royal London Group, was faced with the complex problem of upgrading its financial reporting systems several years ago which included the migration of more than 750 million lines of code.
Austria’s fourth largest building society,Allgemeine Bausparkasse (ABV), which manages more than 600,000 contracts through a network of more than 4,000 independent consultants, needed to replace a 15-year old RISC-based system with a far more effective system.
Kindred Healthcare, a $4 billion healthcare services company operating hospitals, long-term acute care and other services, had seen its business grow to include 138 active company codes, 58,000 Profit/Cost Centers, 51,000 employees, and a database that had grown from 200 GB to more than 2 Terabytes in less than 10 years.

To solve their compliance issues, while also providing improved efficiency of operation and increased planning insight into their company’s operations, these three companies were among many that turned to Itanium-based solutions. Why? Because the combination of the Intel Itanium processors, the unique hardware architectures that allow for straightforward scalability, fast computing speeds, high availability, and state-of-the-art industry-leading software solutions such as those provided by Oracle and SAP, provided the combination of power, flexibility, compliance tools, and business insight unmatched by other platforms currently on the market.

Here’s what happened after their systems were up and running:

For Scottish LIfe, its Itanium-based solution sped up batch processing time by one-third, increased responsiveness to data queries throughout its user network, and lowered overall operating costs by 50 percent from the previous solution.
For ABV, moving to an Itanium-based solution produced what turned out to be as much as an eight-fold improvement in system performance on some of the toughest data mining tasks, while at the same time reducing maintenance costs by 35 percent.
For Kindred Healthcare, the Itanium-based solution decision improved report generation times from 2.6 X to 3.7X, and specific data queries came back as much as 8 times faster than before. It also lowered operating costs and dramatically increased system availability, which were both critical parameters for the company moving forward.

These companies weren’t alone in their choice of computing platform. More than 75percent of the world’s Global 100 Corporations, including five of the top nine financial services companies, have implemented Itanium-based solutions.

What does this mean to you? If your IT systems aren’t completely up-to-date, it is time to find a new computing solution. You toned to stay compliant with the latest financial reporting laws and provide rapid, complex, and responsive business intelligence analysis throughout your company’s networks. Plus, there is an added incentive of dramatically reducing support and maintenance costs at the same time.

And while there are other providers available, where else can you find the most powerful microprocessor solution at the core, the widest choice of operating systems, and a software solutions network of more than 12,000 applications tuned for the Intel Itanium processor?

Don’t just take my word for it. Browse the Alliance website, read the solutions articles, and contact companies for referrals and advice. You will be glad you did, as will your shareholders and customers. And yes, those government auditors in dark suits are going to be a great deal happier as well!

Welcome to the Itanium� Solutions Alliance Blog

2007-10-24T14:35:00-08:00

We know your time is valuable, so we will get straight to the point:

If you’re serious about selecting the best possible Itanium® based solution, or getting the most out of the one you already have, you need to read this blog. Regularly.

We know you have probably done extensive research about mission-critical solutions, have explored the Alliance website in depth, and may have even compiled a “virtual briefcase” of your own reference articles along the way.

It’s a good start, but since Alliance members are constantly innovating at every level of the ecosystem, we created this blog to tell you about the newest offerings in hardware, software, and cutting-edge applications development in a real-time and interactive way. That’s why we launched this blog.

We will cover a wide array of topics, including profiles of new Alliance members, product offerings, and the latest breakthrough technologies leveraging the power of the Itanium processor. We’ll discuss what’s happening behind the scenes in our members’ labs, where new ideas are being created every day. We’ll even address how some of our members’ latest solutions stack up against the competition.

So it’s going to be a great place to learn what’s new at the Alliance, read about the latest-breaking news, commentary and thoughts about mission-critical computing and foster interaction with us, either directly in comments after each entry or by contacting us with suggestions for future blog topics.

Please come back soon, bookmark this page, tell your colleagues about us, and become part of our interactive community.

Please write us with your thoughts at blog(at)itaniumsolutions.com

And thanks for stopping by!