 Although HP will continue to support its PA-RISC customers for years to come, it will discontinue sales of new servers with the architecture in December 2008. For companies that rely on PA-RISC for their product data management (PDM) applications, that might sound like the end of the road. In fact, it’s an opportunity to move enterprise PDM to a new level.
“PA-RISC has served well,” says Roderick Strand, Global Alliance Manager, Siemens PLM Software for HP’s High-Performance Computing Team. “But enterprises running their PDM applications on it today are leaving new capabilities on the table. It’s time for a fresh start.”
A fresh start is even more timely when you consider that market-leading PDM vendors Siemens PLM Software and PTC are always improving their solutions—Teamcenter and Windchill respectively. It will be even harder for enterprises to leverage the new solutions without modern architectures.
That’s where HP Integrity comes in. Leveraging close relationships with Siemens and PTC, HP technicians have been continually working to optimize HP Integrity servers for the next generation of PDM solutions.
“HP Integrity fills the space left by PA-RISC very well,” says Strand, noting that Integrity’s Intel® Itanium® architecture is ideally suited to all PDM application architectures, enabling the Web and database tiers to run much faster. “Depending on the version of PA-RISC customers are running, the increase in database performance will be anywhere from two to seven times better,” he says.
Scaling up
And there are attractive efficiencies of scale. “An HP Integrity system with two processors will run circles around a RISC system with four processors,” notes Strand. “It will handle the same number of users, but you’ll get improved performance, dynamic workload balancing and better scalability, all while reducing your total cost of ownership.”
“Migrating has benefits for all levels of customers,” says Norm Reini, HP’s Worldwide Global Alliance Manager for PTC. “Executives, IT professionals and the engineering teams. For the executives, we can lower TCO, help them consolidate infrastructure and focus on refining their supply chains and customer relations, while freeing up resources for innovation.”
IT professionals appreciate today’s solution as it’s easier to manage and takes fewer resources. Those advantages can be leveraged further by introducing blade infrastructure into the environment.
“On the engineering side, the product development and design teams will enjoy better performance,” says Reini. “Uploads and downloads will be faster whatever the amount of data involved, and the data itself will be easier to control, making it easier to maintain quality.”
“The customer gains not only from the software advances but from the infrastructure advances that we put in place. There are multiple audiences—and multiple benefits.”
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