Author Archive: Alan Choyna

I-tanium, U-tanium, we all scream at Itanium!

Alan Choyna, Tuesday, May 23, 2006 @ 2:30 pm

In our infrastructure practice we've seen an uptick in the number of people implementing Oracle RAC on Linux. It's a good solution and takes some of the headache out of capacity planning, but there are certain hardware pitfalls of which you need to be aware. First among these is the choice of the Intel Itanium platform.

One issue with the Itanium is that the driver support for RAID cards and SAN's is well behind those of other platforms. Consider RHEL4 with Oracle. As of this writing, you cannot find an officially certified RAID card for the Itanium. You're stuck with software RAID or unsupported hardware.

Or consider Hitachi multipathing software for HP OEM'd SANs. First off, Hitachi hasn't built their HDLM software to run on a 64 bit Itanium (the AMD Opterons and Intel Xeon 64bit x86 architectures are supported, of course), and you can’t run Oracle on 32 bit RHAS as that
isn’t certified (don’t even mention the performance hit). So your choices for a decent SAN solution have just been slashed.

On paper, Itanium has great potential, but the much cheaper and better (full current X86 64 bit support!) AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon 64 bit solutions have come into the market and crushed it. Performance benchmarks show that an Opteron solution can run circles around Itanium at a fraction (30 - 40%) of the cost.
As a result, Itanium has never really gained traction, has very low market share, and is falling further behind. Software and hardware support for it lags way behind support for the AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon systems.

I predict that this trend of worsening support will continue, and the future upgradeability and supportability of the system will go from poor to highly suspect.

This scratches just the surface of the issues we've seen with Itanium and they stretch far beyond just implementations of Oracle RAC. The pain is real. If you're considering Itanium, think again.

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hardware driver support confusion

Alan Choyna, Sunday, May 7, 2006 @ 10:05 pm

Trying to keep your web site content up to date can be incredibly challenging when you have a large site with constantly changing data. However, not keeping it up to date can lose you business. That was the case with the behemoth known as HP.

I recently performed a compatibility analysis on the software and hardware for a large client project. If you've done this sort of thing, you know that the conflicting information provided on many vendors web sites can be a source of frustration. When you're as large as HP, the gap between good and bad information can be especially large.

I was trying to determine if there was a RAID card on the HP site that is compatible with the HP Integrity 8620 series Itanium servers (running RedHat Advanced Server 4.0). The answer was yes. Or it was no. Or it was maybe.

l found 3 different documents; one saying that there was no RAID card with Linux support, one saying that one card was supported, but only the RHAS 2.1, and one showing all of the linux drivers available, which apparently excluded all but Redhat Enterprise linux 4.0.

So I decided to try our friendly neighborhood HP rep. He said that they do support RHAS 4.0, but has not yet provided confirmation. Most likely he's searching the same mess of contradictory information on the HP site.

In the end l had to tell the client that the server they selected could not be certified in time due to the conflicting information on its ability to support hardware RAID. As a result HP will miss out on  a million-plus for the 3 servers the client needs.

Lessons learned for hardware and software vendors?

• Plan your site design to make it easier to keep content synchronized and updated. Make sure that only product managers and their teams can publish specs and docs on their products.

Lessons learned for system integrators?

• When analyzing compatibility, don't trust the 1st document you see. Like a journalist, try to find support for it in other documents.

• Look at each item's driver/software support to see whether it lags behind the competition. This should help you determine the useful life of the device. The more recent the driver support, the higher the likelihood it will maintain that support into the future.

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Convergent appliances complicate tech buying

Alan Choyna, Sunday, April 2, 2006 @ 4:38 pm

Many new network infrastructure management appliances are coming on the market, including several convergent devices which integrate many components together in one killer app(liance).

An example of this convergence is the new "F5 Big IP series" load balancing appliance that touts not only load balancing of server and application requests, but also firewall packet filtering and layer 7 application security, traditionally the domain of stand alone firewalls such as Checkpoint FW1.

While l see this convergence as a good thing for ease of management (one appliance to manage vs many) and lower rack space and power consumption, it comes at a much higher cost and misses some of the critical components the single focus applications/appliances provide. Either way it makes tech buying a more complex process trying to understand where each new device may fit in your organization.

When purchasing additional network functionality, in addition to standalone appliances tech buyers should evaluate convergent devices which may ultimately be a better fit for them. With the profusion of new appliances out there, understanding where the new offerings fit in your network requires a more knowledgeable and sophisticated buyer and VAR.

l will be writing an article soon discussing specific convergent devices, highlighting which offerings are suitable for which organizations.

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