"This is our core system to produce our product. We have close to 15,000 people banging on it over the course of the day, especially during month end, when we are inundated with closings. It is absolutely critical that the system be available. With the Itanium-based solution, we have consistently exceeded our service level agreement to our users."

Larry Godec, CIO of First American Title Insurance Company,
talking about their Itanium-based computing solution


Today's global businesses must operate in a 24x7 environment with no down time. Customers and employees demand instant and reliable access to massive amounts of information from all sectors of a company and its supply chain partners. The rules of the game are changing and many IT departments are finding they have to achieve new levels of reliability and availability with the same or even smaller server hardware budgets.


"IT is being pushed to deliver mainframe-class RAS, but without a mainframe budget."
Barb Goldworm, Focus Consulting

An Innovative Opportunity for Reliable Computing

Where mainframes were once the go-to solution for data-intense computing jobs, a new breed of industry-standard servers based on reliable and scalable Intel® Itanium® processors is emerging and bringing with it a new outlook for IT departments dealing with the transition and maintenance of their always on computing environment.

The Intel Itanium processor was designed from its inception to deliver mainframe-class availability. It incorporates primary RAS capabilities for detecting, correcting and containing the kinds of inescapable hard and soft errors that can bring down systems or corrupt data.

Leading hardware vendors from the Itanium® Solutions Alliance are taking advantage of the RAS capabilities of the Itanium processor to build fault-tolerant systems. Features vary by vendor and include:

  • Modular, cell-based designs for improved scalability and availability.
  • Extensive redundancy and hot-plug components for fast scaling and repair.
  • Integrated monitoring, diagnostics and failure prediction.
  • Rapid failover capabilities.
  • System mirroring for operational redundancy and data integrity.
  • Static and dynamic hard partitioning for flexible consolidation with complete workload isolation.
  • Advanced virtualization and workload management for more granular and dynamic allocation

Providing the same level of reliability and availability as legacy mainframe and proprietary RISC systems, but with greater flexibility, choice and lower total cost of ownership makes purchasing an Itanium-based solution the logical choice.

For more detailed information on this important issue we encourage you to download and read the Intel white paper, "Mainframe Reliability on Industry-Standard Servers."