For a while I have been talking about the state and direction of UNIX in the industry.  Now, I would like to change gears.  I’m often asked is there truly the need for Microsoft Windows and SQL Server to be running on Itanium-based systems such as HP’s Integrity servers.  The answer comes down to the type of application you are looking to support.  For business intelligence there is a huge need.

Today’s organizations are looking to providing business insights to all employees leading to better, faster, more relevant decisions on business critical matters.  As such IT departments are facing a continuous increase in the need to gather data and provide services for storage, reporting, and analysis of this data.   This is vital to stay competitive.  This creates 3 unique challenges that are well suited for Itanium based platforms.

First:  Availability

Business intelligence applications are becoming increasingly embedded in the fabric of your business.  As such you can’t afford them to be down for even a limited amount of time.  Every time you lose access you lose the ability to react quickly to market or operational changes.  As such, availability needs to be built in from the processor level all the way to the data center to ensure the availability of the data warehouse.  This includes incorporating RAS features in the processor, building redundancies in the systems and clustering across the data center.

Second:  Scalability/Performance

You can see the importance of business intelligence in the industry just by looking at the amount of stored data.  Did you know that the amount of stared data almost doubles every 12 to 18 months.  In addition to the data, there is an exponential growth to the number of users that require access to business intelligence in their daily activities.  As such, throughput and performance become important.  Itanium-based Windows systems provide the single system horse power and scalability not present on other platforms.  The largest systems support up to 2 TB of memory and 64 cores which enables them to support the bigger data warehouses.  One side note:  Today we support 64 cores with a single instance of Windows, but we recently demonstrated support for 256 logical processors with an Integrity Superdome and next generation version of Windows Server and SQL Server.  Customers will be able to support these next versions of MS software and take advantage of the full capacity of Superdome without changing hardware.