Case for migrating_itaniumhpux_to_x86sles
- 1. White Paper Data Center Modernization The Case for Migrating from Itanium/HP-UX to x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server ® Table of Contents page Modernize Your Data Center by Migrating from Itanium/HP-UX to x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2 D ata Center Modernization—Why and How. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 S USE Linux Enterprise Server versus Itanium/HP-UX . . . . 4 Summary and Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
- 2. Data Center Modernization White Paper The Case for Migrating from Itanium/HP-UX to x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 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. ® Data Center Modernization—Why and How To stay competitive often requires modernizing your data cen er. A “modern” data center infrastructure allows you to t take advantage of new, ongoing innovations and to: Reduce data center costs by decreasing software licensing, maintenance and hardware costs Increase utilization of data center resources by consolidating resources, implementing cloud computing and supporting application/workload mobility Improve performance and energy efficiency by using new hardware Increase responsiveness to address market changes more rapidly and improve business agility Reduce corporate costs and improve employee productivity through strategies such as BYOD (bring your own device) Improve security and management by addressing any gaps caused by increased use of mobile devices for business Support a new wave of applications including new solutions for mobile devices, cloud computing, Big Data and social media Where do you start? Perhaps the two most important areas of data center modernization are implementing virtualization 2 and choosing the “right” operating system/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 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. x86/SUSE Enterprise Linux Server offers the interoperability, openness to innovation, higher performance and lower cost necessary for success today and tomorrow.
- 3. The Decline of Itanium/HP-UX Historically, 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 generated questions about the stability of Itanium long term and helped draw HP-UX’s market share down sharply. Specifically, in March 2011, Oracle announced discontinuation 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 maintenance 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 computing and new storage technologies that reduce costs and make you more responsive to market changes. What is the alternative? platforms used to run mission-critical backend database applications. 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 reliability 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 modernize 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/technologies of RISC/UNIX, plus faster performance, greater interoperability and openness to innovation all at a lower cost, as shown in Table 1 on the following page. Innovation Fuels the Rise of Linux Until recently, x86 servers running Linux lacked the performance, RAS (reliability, availability and scalability), scale-up capabilities and workload management of Itanium/HP-UX __________ * The Itanium architecture is technically not RISC; it is an EPIC (explicitly parallel instruction computing) architecture. However, this paper groups Itanium/HP-UX with the RISC/ UNIX platforms. www.suse.com 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. 3
- 4. Data Center Modernization White Paper The Case for Migrating from Itanium/HP-UX to x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server SUSE Linux Enterprise Server versus Itanium/HP-UX Table 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 ile system F 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 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. A file system comparison table is located at: https://www.suse. com/de-de/products/server/technical-information redictive P 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. Automatic mitigation of software/hardware errors: admin n otifications, isolation/deactivation of faulty components and guided repair. 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. ynamic tracing D framework SystemTap. A scripting language and tool for dynamically i nstrumenting running production Linux operating systems. HP offers a tool called Caliper, which is a general-purpose p erformance 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. ecurity/ S certification Common Criteria Certification EAL 4+ HP-UX 11i has been submitted for evaluation to the Common Criteria Controlled Access Protection Profile evaluation assurance level EAL4. Upcoming FIPS certification for the openSSL module. irtualization V 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 t echnology. ontainers C Linux Containers (LXC) is an operating system-level virtualization method for running multiple isolated Linux systems (containers) on a single control host. 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 b etween 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. 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. 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. Continued on next page 4
- 5. Technologies SUSE Linux Enterprise Server HP-UX lusters C 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. HP Serviceguard: a solid cluster technology with features and functionality similar to Solaris Clusters Service Pack 2 offers new functionality that makes it even easier to set up and use the integrated suite of robust, opensource clustering technologies in SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension. HP Serviceguard can be purchased as part of the HP-UX High Availability Operating Environment (HA-OE), the Data Center O perating Environment (DC-OE), or as a standalone product for HP-UX 11i v3. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server supports other cluster products, including Veritas Cluster Server and HP Serviceguard. ardware platforms H supported x86, x86-64, POWER, Itanium, IBM mainframe Itanium (IA-64) loud computing C 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. HP has two basic cloud offerings: HP Cloud Service and HP C loudSystem. HP Cloud Service is built around OpenStack. 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 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 (Itaniumbased) 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. SV enthusiasm I x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is way ahead of Itanium/ HP-UX in terms of ISV enthusiasm. ISVs use Linux as the d evelopment platform and port to Itanium/HP-UX only if there is sufficient demand. Itanium/HP-UX market share is dropping at a fast pace, leading ISVs to port to Itanium/HP-UX only when absolutely necessary. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server has more than 10,000 ISV a pplications certified. igh Performance H Computing (HPC) Linux dominates the Top500 List of the world’s largest supercomputers 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 a pplications that would take 12 – 15 hours to run on a small office computer, but can run in 10 – 15 minutes on a small highperformance 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 multicore 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. Continued on next page www.suse.com 5
- 6. Data Center Modernization White Paper The Case for Migrating from Itanium/HP-UX to x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Technologies SUSE Linux Enterprise Server HP-UX nnovation I No contest: x86/Linux is at the center of innovation for technologies used to modernize data centers. The only innovation around Itanium/HP-UX, if any exists, would be by HP. No external innovation is happening. ost C 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. 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. 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. 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. erformance P x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is a clear winner on per orm f 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, S PECint_rate and SPeCfp_rate benchmarks clearly outperforms Itanium/HP-UX 11i v3 by a factor of 2x on a per core basis. ig Data support B SUSE has been heavily involved in Big Data with partners such as Teradata, SAP (with SAP HANA), IBM, Cloudera, Hortonworks and others. Itanium/HP-UX provides no visible support for Big Data. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server supports the open Hadoop f ramework for processing Big Data. SUSE also provides the SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension to run multiple clusters for Big Data processing. Summary and Conclusion Itanium/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: 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. In short, HP-UX is a dying platform A lack of the technology, interoperability and innovation necessary to modernize data centers to accommodate new IT trends such as cloud computing, Big Data, mobile devices and social media A confusing cloud computing strategy and product offering Costly operating system licensing and costly hardware 6 Poor per core performance Limited virtualization, and limited interoperation with other virtualization software Rapidly dropping ISV enthusiasm Lock-in In contrast, x86/SUSE Enterprise Linux Server offers the in ter perability, openness to innovation, higher performance o and lower cost necessary for success today and tomorrow. As a result: x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is an excellent platform for replacing your more costly, lower performing Itanium/ HP-UX systems. x86/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is an excellent platform for modernizing your data center.
- 7. Contact your local SUSE Solutions Provider, or call SUSE at: 1 800 796 3700 U.S./Canada 1 801 861 4500 Worldwide SUSE Maxfeldstrasse 5 90409 Nuremberg Germany www.suse.com 262-002502-001 | 05/13 | © 2013 SUSE LLC. All rights reserved. SUSE and the SUSE logo are registered trademarks, and SUSE Studio is a trademark of SUSE LLC in the United States and other countries. All third-party trademarks are the property of their respective owners.