Linux* and Itanium® Architecture - The Business Side

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Last Modified On :   October 6, 2008 9:26 AM PDT
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Introduction

By Allan McNaughton

Today's enterprise IT professionals are faced with a large array of choices when selecting server-operating environments to deploy in the corporate data center. Linux*, a relative newcomer to the enterprise market, is now providing enterprises the opportunity to lower costs, simplify operations, and adopt a fast growing platform. The Intel® Itanium® processor family, with its 64-bit Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC) architecture, is enabling Linux to be an established solution in the data center environment.

Introduced in 1991, Linux has grown rapidly from its humble origins as an experimental operating system built by Linus Torvald. With its open source approach, Linux quickly became a favorite of software developers, system administrators, scientists, and other highly technical individuals. The commercialization of Linux started in 1994 with the formation of Red Hat and Caldera, who brought credibility to the Linux world with their fully supported operating system offerings.

With an ever increasing focus on total cost of ownership (TCO), the level of interest in Linux is rising rapidly as IT departments look to consolidate platforms and significantly lower operating costs. Linux is now a contender in platform selection decisions as vendors of critical business automation software such as SAP, Veritas, Oracle, J.D. Edwards, and Peoplesoft offer Linux versions of their software. This increased support, combined with the availability of low-cost open architecture Itanium servers, is proving to be a strong argument in the TCO discussion.

Focusing on TCO with 64-Bit Linux

The typical corporate IT environment is a complex one filled with hundreds of servers running heterogeneous operating systems often spread throughout the enterprise. IT departments evaluating ownership costs of Itanium-based servers running Linux will find significant improvements in a number of important cost attributes compared to competing RISC offerings and earlier generation 32-bit systems.

The Itanium processor is designed from the ground up for enterprise workloads with support for large memory spaces, enormous caches, and very high levels of instruction parallelism. Linux vendors have focused on the enterprise with product improvements to support performance and scalability requirements while improving high availability with clustering technologies. Itanium systems based on enterprise-class Linux releases are proving to be highly capable and offer an ideal platform for system consolidation.

System consolidation offers the opportunity to remove unnecessary servers from the data center environment. Each server has a quantifiable associated cost for hardware acquisition, ongoing maintenance, supporting infrastructure, software licenses, and skilled technical staffing. Since a single multiprocessor Itanium-based server can do the work of many less capable machines, it is possible to dramatically reduce costs. The cost savings of system consolidation goes beyond the obvious of purchasing one less server.

Fewer servers in the data center have a ripple effect that can mean far less complexity, which further reduces cost. Scaling down the environment by moving to fewer yet more powerful machines can turn an operational nightmare into streamlined operation. With fewer servers to interconnect, a complex network infrastructure can be more manageable and secure. A corresponding reduction in space-consuming equipment can also enable a data center to stay within its current facility rather than embarking on an expensive expansion project.

The savings reach beyond the hardware arena and include reductions in software and support costs. Licensing for enterprise software is typically based on the number of CPUs running the application. Instead of purchasing licenses for a larger number of less capable CPUs, a major cost saving can be achieved by using fewer yet more capable Itanium systems. With the reduction in operational complexity comes a corresponding saving in technical support staff. An IT department moving from 32-bit Linux systems to Itanium-based servers running Linux also benefit immediately from 100% skills reusability.

Application Migration and TCO

When evaluating a platform for TCO, it is important to include costs incurred by software migration activities. The long-term benefits of selecting a platform based on an open architecture cannot be overstated. Linux and the Itanium processor provide a highly capable standards-based system with a clearly defined and fully supported growth path. Because Linux is the most prevalent open architecture server-operating environment, Linux applications currently running in heterogeneous environments can be quickly migrated to the Itanium processor.

Applications already constructed for Linux systems based on 32-bit Intel processors migrate seamlessly to the Itanium platform. The Itanium processor is specifically designed to support full backward compatibility with the IA-32 instruction set. Although the Linux kernel running on an Itanium processor is constructed as a 64-bit binary, it supports API-level backward compatibility with 32-bit Linux applications.

The full power of the Itanium processor can be realized by recompiling enterprise applications for native 64-bit operation. Applications that are not yet migrated to a 64-bit data model will require a minor level of porting effort. Intel and other tool vendors have provided a set of IA-64 compilers that flag most 32-bit to 64-bit portability problems. These issues commonly involve assumptions regarding the size of fundamental data types and can be easily corrected by the development team.

The business case for porting applications to the native IA-64 instruction set is compelling. Allowing an application to fully take advantage of the EPIC architecture can result in significant performance improvements. These improvements in performance and scalability enable the benefits of system consolidation to occur. In addition, an enterprise with 64-bit capable applications is well positioned to benefit from future performance improvements in the Itanium processor family.

Vendor Support

Enterprises considering a move to 64-bit Linux on the Itanium processor have a wide variety of Linux distributions to choose from. Major Linux vendors have pledged full support for the Itanium processor family and are currently shipping Itanium product offerings. With the current push to m ove Linux into the enterprise, these vendors are viewing the Itanium as a first-tier platform and will be providing their latest innovations there first.

Intel also takes supporting the Linux community to the next level with the Intel 64 Fund. This is a quarter-billion dollar equity investment fund that invests in technology companies developing innovative enterprise solutions for Itanium-based servers and workstations. The fund is geared to support start-up companies, as well as established companies, with their IA-64 development activities. Key investors in the fund are Intel, HP, Dell, Compaq, SGI, and an investor group managed by Morgan Stanley Dean Witter.

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About the Author

Allan McNaughton is a patent holding technologist and veteran writer with more than fifteen years industry experience. He is the president of Technical Insight LLC*, a firm specializing in the composition of high-technology white papers. Mr. McNaughton is a frequent contributor to leading technology publications.