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 SUSE Linux Enterprise Server versus Itanium/HP-UX . . . 4Summary and Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

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 HowTo stay competitive often requires modernizing your data cen ter. A “modern” data center infrastructure allows you to take advantage of new, ongoing innovations and to:

Reducedatacentercostsbydecreasingsoftwarelicensing,maintenanceandhardwarecosts

Increaseutilizationofdatacenterresourcesbyconsolidatingresources,implementingcloudcomputingandsupportingapplication/workloadmobility

Improveperformanceandenergyefficiencybyusingnewhardware

Increaseresponsivenesstoaddressmarketchangesmorerapidlyandimprovebusinessagility

ReducecorporatecostsandimproveemployeeproductivitythroughstrategiessuchasBYOD(bringyourowndevice)

Improvesecurityandmanagementbyaddressinganygapscausedbyincreaseduseofmobiledevicesforbusiness

Supportanewwaveofapplicationsincludingnewsolutionsformobiledevices,cloudcomputing,BigDataandsocialmedia

Where do you start? Perhaps the two most important areas of data center modernization are implementing virtualization

and choosing the “right” operating system/hardware server platforms. Virtualization enables you to consolidate multiple workloads often running on individual servers onto signifi-cantly fewer virtualization host servers, reducing data center expenditures substantially. Virtualization also leads to flex-ible networks and enables you to move compute resources, whatever they are, to better respond to demand. Without virtualization your speed in provisioning 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 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. This is especially the case with Itanium/HP-UX.

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 innovation and flexibility and lower costs in your data center—now and in the future.

x86/SUSE Enterprise Linux Server offers the interoperability, openness to innovation, higher performance and lower cost necessary for success today and tomorrow.

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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 use of Itanium for their offerings—has gen-erated questions about the stability of Itanium long term and helped draw HP-UX’s market share down sharply.

Specifically, in March 2011, Oracle announced discontinua-tion of 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, 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 market share, primarily running HP-UX. As the use of Itanium diminishes, HP has experienced an annual double-digit market share decline, beginning in 2008.

Other issues also dog the platform. Support and mainte-nance contracts for Itanium/HP-UX platforms are expensive. Itanium server performance has suffered greatly, especially on a per-core basis. In addition, ISVs are dropping support for applications on Itanium/HP-UX. Lack of innovation around Itanium/HP-UX also limits your ability to take advantage of many new technologies, such as virtualization, cloud com-puting and new storage technologies that reduce costs and make you more responsive to market changes.

What is the alternative?

Innovation Fuels the Rise of LinuxUntil recently, x86 servers running Linux lacked the perfor-mance, RAS (reliability, availability and scalability), scale-up capabilities and workload management of Itanium/HP-UX

platforms used to run mission-critical backend database ap-plications. Now, that is no longer the case.

Intel has moved (and continues to move) several RAS and scale-up features from Itanium processors to its x86 Xeon processors. In addition, HP has incorporated many of the RAS and other availability features from its Itanium-based Superdome 2 computers running HP-UX into its ProLiant computers such as the DL 980, which uses multi-core Xeon processors. These types of enhancements have made SUSE Linux Enterprise Server running on HP’s x86-based servers very competitive 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 reli-ability of x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server platforms now meet and exceed the capabilities of Itanium/HP-UX.

Just as important, many of the innovative ideas used to mod-ernize data centers are built for Linux and x86 servers, and virtually none of them are associated with Itanium/HP-UX. Migrating to or staying with Itanium/HP-UX limits your ability to modernize your data center and totally locks you in to HP.

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 and x86 AMD and Intel servers from IBM such as the IBM System x3690. 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 data center modernization. Today x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server offers the features/technolo-gies of RISC/UNIX, plus faster performance, greater interop-erability and openness to innovation all at a lower cost, as shown in Table 1 on the following page.

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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* TheItaniumarchitectureistechnicallynotRISC;itisanEPIC(explicitlyparallelinstructioncomputing)architecture.However,thispapergroupsItanium/HP-UXwiththeRISC/UNIXplatforms.

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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 Itanium/HP-UXTable 1 below 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 Itanium/HP-UX

Technologies SUSE Linux Enterprise Server HP-UX

File system

Ships with a number of different file systems from which to choose, including Btrfs, Ext3 (default for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server), Ext2, ReiserFS, XFS (open source version) and OCFS2. Each has advantages and disadvantages. See: http://doc.opensuse.org/products/draft/SLES/SLES-storage_sd_draft/filesystems.html A file system comparison table is located at: https://www.suse.com/de-de/products/server/technical-information

The VERITAS File System (or VxFS), called “JFS” and “Online JFS” in HP-UX, is an extent-based file system. Originally developed by VERITAS Software, VxFS is the primary file system of the HP-UX operating 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

This functionality requires hardware support to be fully effective. SUSE is working with all major hardware vendors, especially IBM and Intel, to optimize integration of the hardware and the operating system. Proactive notification: technologies such as MCELog help administrators to get informed early about upcoming hardware issues that might impact the stability of the operating system and the applications.

Automatic mitigation of software/hardware errors: admin notifications, isolation/deactivation of faulty components and guided repair.

Dynamic tracing framework

SystemTap. A scripting language and tool for dynamically instrumenting running production Linux operating systems.

HP offers a tool called Caliper, which is a general-purpose performance analysis tool for applications, processes and systems. HP Caliper allows administrators and developers to understand the performance and execution of an application and to identify ways to improve its runtime performance.

Security/ certification

Common Criteria Certification EAL 4+ Upcoming FIPS certification for the openSSL module.

HP-UX 11i has been submitted for evaluation to the Common Criteria Controlled Access Protection Profile evaluation assurance level EAL4.

Virtualization

Interoperability with leading hypervisors: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server directly supports Xen and KVM, and VMware ESX runs on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. All three support Linux and Windows as guests on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server virtualization hosts.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server can be run as a guest operating system in virtual environments created using VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer.

Linux Containers (see below) is another virtualization technology.

Itanium/HP-UX 11i v3 supports hardware partitions (nPars) and virtual partitions (vPars) specific to HP-UX and Itanium-based Integrity servers. nPars provide complete electrical isolation between partitions. Also provides HP Integrity Virtual Machines, similar to Xen, etc., and HP-UX Containers, a technology similar to 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.

Containers

Linux Containers (LXC) is 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, developed as part of LXC. 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.

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Technologies SUSE Linux Enterprise Server HP-UX

Clusters

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP 2 with High Availability Extension lets you implement mission-critical Linux clusters using OCFS2, a shared-disk, POSIX-compliant generic cluster file system. Service Pack 2 offers new functionality that makes it even easier to set up and use the integrated suite of robust, open-source clustering technologies in SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server supports other cluster products, including Veritas Cluster Server and HP Serviceguard.

HP Serviceguard: a solid cluster 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

SUSE Cloud is built on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and is based on the popular OpenStack project. SUSE Cloud is also 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 clouds. SUSE Cloud interoperates with other cloud platforms built around OpenStack. SUSE Cloud runs on various Linux platforms and is integrated with Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS).

HP has two basic cloud offerings: HP Cloud Service and HP CloudSystem. HP Cloud Service is built around OpenStack. HP CloudSystem is not so much a platform as 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, and VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V, KVM and HP Integrity virtual machines. If you buy into HP’s cloud strategy, you will almost certainly have to hire 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. 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 leading UNIX platforms for RAS.

ISV enthusiasm

x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is way ahead of Itanium/HP-UX in terms of ISV enthusiasm. ISVs use Linux as the development platform and port to Itanium/HP-UX only if there is sufficient demand. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server has more than 10,000 ISV applications certified.

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

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, also run on x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. High-performance computers running crossover applications are smaller than the supercomputers. They are oriented toward companies such as financial service companies that have applications that would take 12 – 15 hours to run on a small office computer, but can run in 10 – 15 minutes on a small high-performance computer in a cluster format using commodity x86 servers.

Itanium/HP-UX used to be a leader in the HPC area. Today, Itanium/HP-UX has only a single system on the Top500 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. Crossover HPC applications can run on Itanium/HP-UX, but the cost of an Itanium/HP-UX platform would be almost prohibitive.

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

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

Anextremelyuncertainroadmap,evenforthenextfewyears,duetolackofmarketinterestinbothItaniumandHP-UX,andmostimportant,lackofinterestinItaniumbyIntel.Inshort,HP-UXisadyingplatform

Alackofthetechnology,interoperabilityandinnovationnecessarytomodernizedatacenterstoaccommodatenewITtrendssuchascloudcomputing,BigData,mobiledevicesandsocialmedia

Aconfusingcloudcomputingstrategyandproductoffering Costlyoperatingsystemlicensingandcostlyhardware

Poorpercoreperformance Limitedvirtualization,andlimitedinteroperationwithother

virtualizationsoftware RapidlydroppingISVenthusiasm Lock-in

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

x86/SUSELinuxEnterpriseServerisanexcellentplatformforreplacingyourmorecostly,lowerperformingItanium/HP-UXsystems.

x86/SUSELinuxEnterpriseServerisanexcellentplatformformodernizingyourdatacenter.

Technologies SUSE Linux Enterprise Server HP-UX

Innovation No contest: x86/Linux is at the center of innovation for tech-nologies used to modernize data centers.

The only innovation around Itanium/HP-UX, if any exists, would be 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 difference is the cost of the Itanium servers. 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 applications, resulting in lower software licensing costs.

The cost of HP-UX 11i v3 varies depending on the operating environment (OE) and the Itanium-based Integrity server used. HP-UX 11i v3 on older Integrity servers is licensed by the number of cores, whereas for the newer Integrity servers licensing is by socket count. Regardless of whether HP-UX 11i v3 is running on old or newer Integrity servers, HP-UX 11i v3 is expensive compared to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (socket count licensed). Pricing for the Virtual Server OE, which includes Integrity VM and vPar partitions on an older Integrity server, is US$4,420 per core and 50 percent of that for the newer Integrity servers (when socket pricing is translated into core pricing). The cost for a higher performing x86 multi-core server from AMD or Intel running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is a fraction of the cost of most Itanium/HP-UX 11i v3 platforms.

Performance

x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is a clear winner on per form-ance tests, especially the core SPEC performance benchmarks. When coupled with the cost of Itanium servers, x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is a huge winner in terms of cost savings.

x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on SPECint, SPECfp, SPECint_rate and SPeCfp_rate benchmarks clearly outperforms Itanium/HP-UX 11i v3 by a factor of 2x on a per core basis.

Big Data support

SUSE has been heavily involved in Big Data with 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.

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