HPTF 2010
- From: Keith Parris <keithparris_deletethis@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 01 Jul 2010 13:03:29 -0600
Information from HP Technology Forum 2010:
The theme was "Accelerate Outcomes with Convergence" and 3 key words: Converge. Innovate. Transform.
Videos of the keynote sessions should be available soon at http://h30406.www3.hp.com/campaigns/2010/events/hptechforum/keynote.php. I particularly enjoyed the keynote by Jeffrey Katzenberg of DreamWorks Animation, who provided special glasses for everyone and showed us 3D clips from upcoming movies.
Attendance numbers were quite healthy. I had feared that with the present state of the economy, attendance might be down, but it appeared that there were at least as many people present as last year, possibly more.
OpenVMS 8.4 was officially announced on Monday and the official launch session was on Tuesday (see http://h30507.www3.hp.com/t5/Mission-Critical-Computing-Blog/HP-Tech-Forum-Session-OpenVMS-8-4-Launch-Strategy-Roadmap-with/ba-p/81256). 8.4 supports OpenVMS under HPVM, IP as a native cluster interconnect, and 6-member shadowsets, with other performance and availability improvements in addition.
In her session at HPTF entitled "Launch, Strategy & Roadmap: With OpenVMS Your Future Is Secure," Shobha Benakatti, who leads the OpenVMS organization, reminded us that last year at HPTF, customers asked HP to go ahead and release version 8.4 ahead of the availability of Tukwila hardware, and not to wait to release 8.4 until the new hardware was ready, and she reported that HP listened and that is exactly what has been done. OpenVMS 8.4 is presently available and runs on all the hardware supported by the prior 8.3 and 8.3-1H1 releases. OpenVMS 8.4 will support the new Tukwila-based servers in August with an enablement patch kit. OpenVMS 8.4 had the largest field test ever, with more than 250 customers testing 8.4.
OpenVMS Marketing successes this year included a very positive report by Gartner Group (Gartner ID: G00164706), and new success stories on Fraport AG (http://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA0-4293ENW.pdf), UK National Health Service Blood & Transplant (http://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA1-3908EEW.pdf), and ABF / voestalpine (http://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA1-5913ENW.pdf)
OpenVMS was represented in the EXPO with a display and demo entitled "Expand OpenVMS Options with Version 8.4."
An OpenVMS SIG Meeting was led by Greg Guthman, with lively discussions on various topics, including VMS Marketing (always a popular topic) and why there were no plans yet for support of OpenVMS on the Superdome 2 (because most OpenVMS customers cluster together multiple smaller, less-expensive machines and thus very few actually buy a Superdome, so the OpenVMS organization is waiting to hear from customers who definitely need support before incurring the expense of qualification for the Superdome 2).
Tukwila (Intel Itanium 9300 series) is a quad-core chip compared with its dual-core predecessors Montvale (Intel Itanium2 9100 series) and Montecito (Intel Itanium2 9000 series). In a session by Prashanth K E of OpenVMS Engineering entitled "OpenVMS 8.4 on Tukwila Quad Core 9300 – Blazing Performance", we learned that in benchmarks by OpenVMS Engineering, in addition to having twice as many cores, each 9300 core is about 15% faster for integer work and 17% faster on floating-point than the 9100/9000. In other benchmarks, the BL890c i2 blade performs 2X better than the rx8640 for Rdb, for Apache, and for Java work.
With OpenVMS Power Management and a feature called Intel Turbo Boost, a processor can actually run at frequencies higher the advertised frequency, provided the processor package is below its rated power, thermal and current limits. That is, if you have an idle core, an active core can use its headroom to get a boost in frequency.
The new Tukwila-based blades can scale from 2 sockets to 8 sockets (32 cores). Tukwila has the new Quick Path Interconnect (QPI), with on-CPU memory controllers and point-to-point connections between CPUs. Memory bandwidth is 6X the prior generation of blades, and I/O bandwidth is 5X better. DDR3 memory is used.
In addition to the blades, a new 2U rack-mount server, the rx2800, with 2 sockets (8 cores), is coming.
For the Tukwila-based servers, licensing is changing from per-core to per-socket, so that the license cost will not double in going from dual-core to quad-core chips. The number of Operating Environments has been simplified from three (Foundation, Enterprise, and Mission-Critical) to just two (Base and High Availability).
FlexFabric got a lot of attention. With Fibre Channel and Ethernet continuing to go to higher speeds, and with the introduction of Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCOE) and attempts to converge SANs and LANs together in one Converged Enhanced Ethernet fabric, HP's FlexFabric provides the promise of wire-once, change-ready connectivity to get customers through industry changes over the next few years.
Narayanan A N from OpenVMS Engineering presented a hands-on lab entitled "OpenVMS As A Guest on HPVM." OpenVMS can run in a virtual machine under HPVM on Integrity Servers with Intel Itanium 9000 (Montecito), 9100 (Montvale), and 9300 (Tukwila) processors. OpenVMS 8.4 is required. More info is available in "Installing OpenVMS Integrity servers Version 8.4 as a Guest OS on HP Integrity Virtual Machines" at http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvmsft/hpvm/integrityvm_cookbook.pdf. I found this lab was an excellent hands-on session where you actually got to create and configure your own VM under HPVM using the new blade servers and install and run your own instance of OpenVMS 8.4 under HPVM.
Mandar Chitale, Global Lead for the Office of Customer Programs (and one of the team who handle the e-mails to OpenVMS.Programs@xxxxxx) presented a session "System Management with OpenVMS" describing the software available to manage OpenVMS, including HP Systems Insight Manager (SIM), HP Virtual Server Environment (VSE), HP System Management Homepage (SMH), Web Based Enterprise Services (WEBES), as well as the familiar products Availability Manager, TDC, ECP, and OpenVMS Management Station (OMS). He also described how HP OpenView and the VMS Smart Plug-In (VMS SPI) and OpenVMS Performance Agent (OVPA) can be used to help manage OpenVMS.
Yours Truly presented a session entitled "Using an IP Network as an OpenVMS Cluster Interconnect." Resources pointed to included the 8.4 doc. set at http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/os84_index.html, a white paper "Guidelines to Configure Cluster over IP" at http://www.connect-community.org/resource/resmgr/library_whitepapers/cluster_over_ip_whitepaper.pdf and a presentation “IP Cluster Interconnect (IPCI) aka OpenVMS Cluster over IP” by NilakantanMahadevan at http://www.connect-community.de/Events/OpenVMS2009/folien/07-OpenVMS_clusteroverIP.pdf. I also presented a session entitled "Using Shadowsetswith More Than 3 Members", a session on Maximizing High Availability, and one presenting 'Case Studies of Disaster Tolerance and Disaster Recovery with OpenVMS." All of my presentations will soon be made available as usual at http://www2.openvms.org/kparris/
Wayne Sauer of PARSEC Group presented a session on "Understanding the Integrity Console," which provided an excellent introduction to Integrity Servers for those new to that platform, describing the MP, BMC, EFI, the process of booting OpenVMS and the on-disk structures required to support this, and how to set boot options, both at the console level and from within OpenVMS, and also described the Integrated Lights-Out (iLo) web-based interface. Wayne also presented a session on "Using Free Tools to Analyze OpenVMS Performance," describing tuning methodology and the free TDC, ECP, T4, and Timeline Visualizer (TLviz) tools. Wayne also did a hands-on lab providing an "Introduction to SDA by viewing OpenVMS Process Internals."
Brad McCusker from SCI gave a session entitled "Best Practices for OpenVMS System Management for the 21st Century." He described the state of the art in OpenVMS system management today, and included many helpful suggestions as well as cautions, and advocated taking a proactive rather than reactive approach.
New for this year were sessions entitled "Meet the HP Ambassadors," where HP customers could meet with HP experts in a round-table discussion format. I had two of these, which provided lively discussions on these two topics: "OpenVMS Clusters" and "Disaster Tolerance & Disaster Recovery with OpenVMS." There were also Meet the HP Ambassador discussions led by Mandar Chitale on the topics of "Migrations – Reasons to move to OpenVMS on HP Integrity Servers" and "Open Source with OpenVMS."
If you missed HPTF this year, be sure you don’t miss the OpenVMS Bootcamp, with over 125 OpenVMS topics on the agenda (and each session presented twice). See http://www.connect-community.org/default.asp?page=OVMSBootcampHome.
.
- Follow-Ups:
- Re: HPTF 2010
- From: BillPedersen
- Re: HPTF 2010
- Prev by Date: Re: Using Kermit-95 to emulate a VT320
- Next by Date: Re: Using Kermit-95 to emulate a VT320
- Previous by thread: Re: : Re: mem-f-nomem error
- Next by thread: Re: HPTF 2010
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
