The Case for Migrating from Itanium/HP-UX to x86/SUSE ... · HP-UX. Staying with Itanium/HP-UX...

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Table of Contents page Modernize Your Data Center by Migrating from Itanium/HP-UX to x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Data Center Modernization—Why and How ................... 2 The Decline of Itanium/HP-UX ......................................... 3 Innovation Fuels the Rise of Linux ................................... 3 SUSE Linux Enterprise Server versus HP-UX................... 4 Summary and Conclusion ..................................................7 The Case for Migrating from Itanium/HP-UX to x86/SUSE ® Linux Enterprise Server White Paper Data Center Modernization

Transcript of The Case for Migrating from Itanium/HP-UX to x86/SUSE ... · HP-UX. Staying with Itanium/HP-UX...

Table of Contents page

Modernize Your Data Center by Migrating from Itanium/HP-UX to x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2Data Center Modernization—Why and How . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 The Decline of Itanium/HP-UX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3Innovation Fuels the Rise of Linux . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 SUSE Linux Enterprise Server versus HP-UX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4Summary and Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7

The Case for Migrating from Itanium/HP-UX to x86/SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server

White PaperData Center Modernization

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Data Center Modernization White PaperThe Case for Migrating from Itanium/HP-UX to x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server

Data Center Modernization—Why and HowStaying competitive in today’s market requires modernizing your data centers. Why? “Modern” data center infrastruc-tures allow you to:

Easilytakeadvantageofnewinnovation Reducedatacentercostsbydecreasingsoftwarelicensing,

maintenanceandhardwareacquisitioncosts Increasedatacenterresourceutilizationbyconsolidat-

ingassets,implementingcloudcomputingandsupportingapplicationportability

Improveworkloadperformanceandloweroperatingexpensesbyusingnewer,morepowerfulyetenergyefficienthardware

Increasebusinessagilitybyhelpingyouaddresstechnologyandmarketchangesmorerapidly

ImproveemployeeproductivitybysupportingstrategiessuchasBYOD(bringyourowndevice)

Improvesecurityandmanagementbyaddressinganygapscausedbyanever-changingITlandscape

Supportanewwaveofapplicationsincludingnewsolutionsformobiledevices,cloudcomputing,BigData,andsocialmedia

Where do you start? Perhaps the two most important areas to consider when modernizing your data center are imple-menting virtualization and choosing the “right” operating sys-tem/hardware server platforms. Virtualization enables you to consolidate multiple workloads, often running on individual servers, onto significantly fewer virtualization host servers, reducing data center expenditures substantially. Virtualization also leads to flexible networks and enables you to move compute resources, whatever they are, to better respond to changes in demand. Without virtualization your speed in pro-visioning and de-provisioning resources is greatly constrained.

Selecting an operating system/hardware server platform for your data center has long-term consequences. The selection process must take into account not only features of both

Modernize Your Data Center by Migrating from Itanium/HP-UX to x86/SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server Discover how migrating from Itanium/HP-UX to x86/ SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server can provide you with greater roadmap certainty, a high rate of innovation and ISV enthusiasm, and lower software licensing and maintenance costs in your data center—now and in the future.

Today, the price, performance, and reliability of industry-standard x86 servers running Linux have increased to the point where they can meet or exceed the capabilities of Itanium/HP-UX.

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the operating system and the hardware platform on which it runs, but the ability of the platform to enable and support your future business requirements.

The Decline of Itanium/HP-UXHistorically, Itanium/HP-UX has been a competitive UNIX platform even though Itanium’s original performance was disappointing compared to other RISC processors. However, in recent years, uncertainty around Intel’s support for Itanium processors—as well as the uncertainty about Oracle and Red Hat’s continuing support for Itanium with their offerings—has generated questions about the viability of Itanium long term and helped draw HP-UX’s market share down sharply.

Specifically, in March 2011, Oracle announced that it would dis-continue development on Itanium. Prior to this, Red Hat and Microsoft had announced plans to drop support for Itanium. An HP lawsuit against Oracle in the latter half of 2011 resulted in Oracle being ordered to maintain support for Itanium/ HP-UX. By this time, however, market interest in Itanium/HP-UX had waned, and orders for Itanium/HP-UX were either delayed or canceled. HP ended up paying Intel several hundred million dollars to keep Itanium afloat. Today HP has about 95 percent of the Itanium server market share, primarily running HP-UX. As the use of Itanium diminishes, HP-UX has experienced an annual double-digit market share decline from 10 percent to more than 20 percent per year,1 beginning in 2008.2

Other issues also dog the platform. Support and mainte-nance contracts for Itanium/HP-UX platforms continue to be much more expensive than for x86-64/Linux.3 Itanium server performance has suffered greatly, especially on a per-core basis.4 In addition, ISVs are dropping support for applica-tions on Itanium/HP-UX. Lack of innovation around Itanium/HP-UX limits your ability to take advantage of many new technologies, such as virtualization, cloud computing and

new storage technologies that reduce data center costs and help you be more responsive to changing business needs.

Innovation Fuels the Rise of LinuxWhat is the alternative? Until recently, x86 servers running Linux lacked the performance, RAS (reliability, availability and serviceability), scale-up capabilities and workload man-agement of Itanium/HP-UX platforms used to run mission-critical, back-end database applications. Now, that is no longer the case.

Intel has incorporated (and continues to add) RAS and scale-up features from its Itanium processors into its x86 Xeon processors. In addition, HP has incorporated many of the RAS features from its Itanium-based Superdome 2 hardware running HP-UX into its ProLiant computers such as the DL 980, which uses multi-core Xeon processors. These features include improved interprocessor communication, higher in-terconnect bandwidth, machine check architecture recovery, double device correction and more.

These types of enhancements have made SUSE Linux Enter-prise Server running on HP’s x86-based servers very compe-titive with its Itanium/HP-UX platforms in terms of RAS, I/O speed, processor performance, resiliency and more. In other words, today, the price, performance and reliability of x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server platforms now meet or exceed the capabilities of Itanium/HP-UX.5

Just as important, many of the innovative technologies used to modernize data centers are built for Linux and x86 serv-ers, and virtually none of them are associated with Itanium/HP-UX. Staying with Itanium/HP-UX limits your ability to modernize your data center and effectively locks you in.

Itanium/HP-UX is viewed as having an extremely uncertain roadmap, even for the next few years, due to lack of market interest in both Itanium and HP-UX and, most important, lack of interest in Itanium by Intel.

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1 IDCWorldwideServerOperatingEnvironmentsShipmentsandInstalledBase,1996–2016, August 2012.

2www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/oracle-resumes-hp-itanium-support-for-n/240006723

3www.pcworld.com/article/223360/Oracle.html4www.zdnet.com/blog/howlett/hp-superdome-dead-as-a-dodo/

41945http://docs.media.bitpipe.com/io_10x/io_106502/item_582322/

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Data Center Modernization White PaperThe Case for Migrating from Itanium/HP-UX to x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server versus HP-UXTable 1 provides a detailed comparison of the features and technologies available in x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Itanium/HP-UX.

Table 1: Comparison of Features/Technologies Available in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and HP-UX

Technologies SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (for x86) HP-UX (for Itanium)

File system

Ships with several different file systems, including btrfs, ext3 (default for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server), ext2, ReiserFS, XFS (open source version) and OCFS2. Each has advantages and disadvantages.6 A file system comparison table is located at: www.suse.com7

Includes the VERITAS File System (VxFS), sometimes called “JFS” and “Online JFS” in HP-UX. Originally developed by VERITAS Software, VxFS is an extent-based file system. VxFS is also supported on AIX, Linux, Solaris and OpenSolaris. It is comparable to other UNIX file systems such as Oracle Sun ZFS.

Predictive self-healing

Requires hardware support to be fully effective. SUSE is working with all major hardware vendors, especially IBM and Intel, to optimize integration of hardware and operating system in this area. Supports proactive notifications. Technologies such as MCELog help administrators with early warning about upcoming hardware issues that might impact the stability of the operating system and applications.

Supports automatic mitigation of software/hardware errors, such as admin notifications, isolation/deactivation of faulty components and guided repair.

Dynamic tracing framework

Ships with SystemTap, a scripting language and tool for dynamically instrumenting running production Linux operating systems.

HP offers a tool called “Caliper”—a general-purpose performance analysis tool for applications, processes and systems. HP Caliper allows administrators and developers to understand application performance and execution and identify ways to improve runtime performance.

Security/ certification

Meets Common Criteria Certification at Evaluation Assurance Level 4+ (EAL4+). Is FIPS 140 certified for the openSSL module.

HP-UX 11i has been submitted for evaluation under Common Criteria Controlled Access Protection Profile Evaluation Assurance Level 4 (EAL4).

Virtualization

Interoperable with leading open source and proprietary third-party hypervisors: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server ships with Xen and KVM, and can be used to create virtual host environments that support Linux and Windows guests.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server itself is a supported guest operating system in virtual environments created using KVM, Xen, VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Citrix XenServer.

Linux Containers (seenextpage) is another supported virtuali-zation technology.

HP-UX supports hardware partitions (nPars) and virtual partitions (vPars), specifically for Itanium-based Integrity servers. nPars provide complete electrical isolation between partitions. Also provided is HP Integrity Virtual Machines, a technology similar to Xen, HP-UX Containers, Linux Containers, and Oracle Solaris Containers. HP-UX virtualization technology does not interoperate with other common virtualization technologies except in a limited fashion using HP Integrity Virtual Machines.

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As a result, enterprises are migrating from Itanium/HP-UX to x86/Linux platforms running new multi-core, scale-up x86 servers such as the HP DL980 Xeon 7500 series servers, x86 AMD and Intel servers from IBM such as the IBM System x3690, and PowerEdge M910 and R910 servers from Dell. In fact, for many corporations with an HP-UX installed base, migrating legacy Itanium and PA-RISC/HP-UX systems to

x86/Linux—especially SUSE Linux Enterprise Server—is the centerpiece of their data center modernization initiatives. Today x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server offers the features/ technologies of RISC/UNIX, plus higher performance, greater interoperability and openness to innovation all at a lower cost, as shown in Table 1 below.

6http://doc.opensuse.org/products/draft/SLES/SLES-storage_sd_draft/filesystems.html

7www.suse.com/products/server/technical-information

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Technologies SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (for x86) HP-UX (for Itanium)

Containers

Supports Linux Containers (LXC), an operating system-level virtualization method for running multiple isolated Linux systems (containers) on a single control host. LXC relies on the Linux kernel cgroups functionality that became available in version 2.6.24. In principle, both Linux Containers and HP-UX Containers are similar. They are virtualization technologies at the application level, so they are “above” the operating system kernel. Unlike hypervisor-based virtualization, they do not add an additional software layer.

HP-UX Containers provide an environment for consolidating multiple workloads within a single image of HP-UX 11i v3, similar to Linux Containers and Oracle Solaris Containers.

Clusters

Combined with SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension, you can implement mission-critical Linux clusters using OCFS2, a shared-disk, and POSIX-compliant generic cluster file system. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server also is supported by other third-party cluster products, including Veritas Cluster Server and HP Serviceguard.

HP Serviceguard is a solid clustering technology with features and functionality similar to Solaris Clusters. HP Serviceguard can be purchased as part of the HP-UX High Availability Operating Environment (HA-OE), the Data Center Operating Environment (DC-OE), or as a standalone product for HP-UX 11i v3.

Hardware platforms supported

x86, x86-64, POWER, Itanium, IBM mainframe Itanium (IA-64)

Cloud computing

Using SUSE Cloud you can build and deploy private clouds within your firewall. SUSE Cloud is based on the popular OpenStack, open source project, and is integrated with SUSE Manager and SUSE Studio™ to provide management and application development for SUSE Cloud as well as other cloud platforms. Various third-party cloud management tools, such as Aeolus and ConVirt, are also available to manage SUSE Cloud-based private clouds. SUSE Cloud interoperates with other cloud platforms built around OpenStack. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is available through more than 50 public cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

HP has two basic cloud offerings: HP Cloud Service and HP CloudSystem. HP Cloud Service is built around OpenStack for x86/Linux. HP CloudSystem is not so much a platform as it is a collection of intersecting HP products and roadmaps to get cloud capabilities. Some of these HP products are basically old HP offerings stamped “cloud.” HP CloudSystem supports both HP Integrity servers (Itanium-based) and x86 servers. It supports Windows, Linux and HP-UX operating systems, as well as VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V, KVM and HP Integrity virtual machines. HP’s cloud offerings are complex to install and configure. Most enterprises selecting HP Cloud System end up hiring HP’s professional services group to either implement clouds or, at least, help implement clouds.

RAS

Combination of new multi-core, scale-up AMD/Intel hardware married with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server compares favorably with Itanium/HP-UX with respect to RAS. Today RAS can no longer be used to differentiate Itanium/HP-UX and x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

Itanium/HP-UX is still one of the top three UNIX platforms in terms of RAS.

ISV enthusiasm

ISV enthusiasm for x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server dramatically exceeds that for Itanium/ HP-UX. Increasingly, ISVs like SAP are using Linux as their development platform and porting to Itanium/HP-UX only if there is sufficient demand. 10,000+ ISV applications are certified to run on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

Itanium/HP-UX market share is dropping at a fast pace, leading ISVs to port to Itanium/HP-UX only when absolutely necessary.

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Data Center Modernization White PaperThe Case for Migrating from Itanium/HP-UX to x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server

Technologies SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (for x86) HP-UX (for Itanium)

High Performance Computing (HPC)

Linux dominates the Top500 List of the world’s largest super-computers with 94 percent of the supercomputers running Linux. And SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is running on many of them. HPC business applications, referred to as “crossover” HPC applications, are also preferred on x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. High-performance computer clusters running crossover applications are typically smaller than supercomputer clusters.

Itanium/HP-UX used to be a leader in the HPC market. Today, Itanium/HP-UX has only a single system on the Top500 supercomputer list. Its performance on a per-core basis (based on SPEC processor benchmarks) has dropped significantly below that of x86 multi-core servers from AMD and Intel running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server(seethePerformancetableentrybelow). Crossover HPC applications can run on Itanium/HP-UX, but the cost of an Itanium/HP-UX platform would be almost prohibitive.

Innovation

x86/Linux is at the center of innovation for technologies used to modernize data centers. Open access to source code encourages innovation, as does a vibrant, growing community.

Today, HP is effectively the only supporter of Itanium/HP-UX. Innovation, if any, on this platform is being done by HP. No external innovation is happening.

Cost

x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server platforms are a fraction of the cost of Itanium/HP-UX platforms. The big differences are cost of the Itanium servers, licensing of HP-UX, and maintenance for the Itanium platform. Because the per-core performance of x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is often 2x that of Itanium/HP-UX, you have big savings on application licensing because you need fewer cores (and sockets) to run those applications.

The cost of HP-UX varies depending on the operating environment (OE) and the Itanium-based Integrity server used. HP-UX with the Data Center OE with clustering and virtualization wrapped together has a per core cost of over US$4,000.8,9 The cost of a five-year Priority subscription for a 32 core (four socket) IBM Xeon 7560 is US$12,000. The one time cost of an HP-UX license for the HP Integrity rx8640 with 32 cores is US$128,000. And the IBM Xeon 7560 provides 2x the performance per core.

Performance

x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is a clear winner on perfor-mance tests, especially the core SPEC performance benchmarks. These benchmarks include SPECint, SPECfp, SPECint_rate, and SPECfp_rate. The results of SPEC benchmarks can be found at: www.spec.org When SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, running on Dell, HP, and IBM x86 servers, are compared to HP-UX running on HP Itanium servers such as the Integrity rx8640, the SPEC benchmarks show that x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is, across the board, approximately 2x faster than Itanium servers at a fraction of the cost.

x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on SPECint, SPECfp, SPECint_rate and SPECfp_rate benchmarks (www.spec.org) clearly outperforms Itanium/HP-UX by a factor of 2x on a per-core basis.

Big Data support

SUSE partners with a wide variety of Big Data technology partners such as Teradata, SAP (with SAP HANA), IBM, Cloudera, Hortonworks and others. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server supports the open Hadoop framework for processing Big Data. SUSE also provides the SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension to run multiple clusters for Big Data processing.

Itanium/HP-UX provides no visible support for Big Data.

8www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press_kits/2010/ nextgenerationintegrity/NGISHPUXMarch2010.pdf

9http://www8.hp.com/h20195/v2/GetPDF.aspx%2F4AA3-5947ENW.pdf

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Summary and ConclusionItanium/HP-UX still has excellent RAS capabilities. It could also have been a formidable competitor to Linux for the back-end, mission-critical database applications market were Itanium to have not lost favor in the market. Today, Itanium/HP-UX is viewed as having:

Anextremelyuncertainroadmap,evenforthenextfewyears.ThisisduetolackofmarketinterestinbothItaniumandHP-UXand,mostimportantly,lackofinterestinItaniumbyIntel.Inshort,HP-UXisadyingplatform

Alackofthetechnology,interoperabilityandinnovationnecessarytomodernizedatacentersandtoaccommodatenewITtrendssuchascloudcomputing,BigData,mobiledevicesandsocialmedia

Aconfusingcloudcomputingstrategyandproductoffering Costlyoperatingsystemlicensingandcostlyhardware Poorper-coreperformance Limitedvirtualization,andlimitedinteroperabilityand

integrationwithothervirtualizationsoftware RapidlydroppingISVenthusiasm Lock-in

In contrast, x86/SUSE Enterprise Linux Server offers the in-teroperability, openness to innovation, higher performance and lower cost necessary for success today and tomorrow. As a result:

x86/SUSELinuxEnterpriseServerisanexcellentplatformforreplacingyourmorecostly,lowerperformingItanium/HP-UXsystems.

x86/SUSELinuxEnterpriseServerisanexcellentplatformformodernizingyourdatacenter.

x86/SUSELinuxEnterpriseServerofferstheaffordability,interoperabilityandinnovationnecessarytosupportmoderndatacentersinthefaceofnewtechnologiessuchascloudcomputing,BigData,mobiledevicesandsocialmedia.

x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is a preferred ISV development platform while Itanium/HP-UX is a secondary platform to which applications may only be ported if demand warrants.

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