Mision Critical Innovation Awards
Presented by HP and Intel
Martin Fink, SVP & GM, Business Critical Systems, HP and Peter Gleissner, Sales Director EMEA, Member of Board Intel® EMEA, Intel, hosted a spectacular Mission-Critical Innovation Awards Celebration the evening of 28 November at the Hotel Imperial in downtown Vienna, to recognize innovation and excellence in mission-critical computing. Ten award finalists were in attendance from around the globe to receive recognition for their groundbreaking work using mission-critical systems from HP and Intel. HP and Intel would like to sincerely thank all of this year's participants and are very pleased to announce the following category winners! Congratulations!
Mission-Critical Data: Gravic. A large Canadian bank modernized its data center architecture from "active/backup" to an "active/active" network using NonStop servers and the Shadowbase product suite from its partner, Gravic. This combination provides the highest availability profile of any commercially available platform. The new system reduced planned and unplanned system outages from hours or even days to a few minutes.
Converged Data Center: PinkRoccade Healthcare. PinkRoccade, a healthcare IT solutions provider, was faced with a nearly impossible schedule: moving six data centers to a central facility in nine months. They used this rare opportunity to design and build a completely new infrastructure using Integrity server blades and ProLiant with VMware to decrease service deployment time from weeks to minutes, lower power costs by 40%, and enable a new SaaS business model through dynamic provisioning.
Best New Application: Secure64. The DNS is one of the most critical but often overlooked aspects of an organization's server infrastructure, and DNS attacks are on the rise. Secure64 tackled this problem with Secure64 DNS Cache, running on their own micro OS, SourceT, to provide the highest performance per core of any DNS caching solution, while protecting service providers and their users from attacks. An independent review found the solution to be immune to all known forms of malware and rootkits.
Humanitarian / Environmental Impact: University Hospitals. University Hospitals Health System's mission is "to heal, to teach, to discover". Their strategic plan includes providing care - and sharing all data - over their 25 locations. But their radiology environment could not support the digital image transfers of over 700,000 exams annually, and patients formerly had to hand-carry their films from site to site. UH chose to implement the Sectra IDS7 product running on Itanium servers and the current system is now sized to handle one million exams annually. Patient care has been standardized and patient images are accessible 24x7, 365 days a year.
Mission Critical Innovation Award winners and finalists
The Mission-Critical Innovation Awards, presented by HP and Intel, recognize leaders in IT for their groundbreaking work developing solutions for mission-critical computing. The program is a worldwide competition culminating in an exclusive awards celebration held just before HP DISCOVER in Vienna, Austria. Submissions were judged by an independent panel using a scorecard that considered several key factors of the solution's deployment in the following categories:
Mission-Critical Data
Intel® Itanium®-based systems have proven to be an extremely robust platform for mission-critical applications, blending business-critical reliability and availability with performance and scalability to drive the world's most data-intensive applications. This category recognizes the success organizations have delivered by implementing a database, data warehousing, or line-of-business solution that takes advantage of the dependability and performance of Itanium-based platforms while producing impactful results.
Converged Data Center
Open and versatile systems have proven to be scalable, economical alternatives to proprietary systems and "convergence" is happening on multiple fronts. Itanium-based systems remain a solid choice for migrations from mainframe and RISC-based platforms to an open architecture framework, while Intel® Xeon®-based x86 environments are increasingly supporting mission-critical applications. The versatility and efficiency of blade servers have also made a significant impact in today's data center. This category highlights the success of projects that are modernizing mission-critical computing environments with: migrations to Itanium-based systems, and/or effectively introducing Xeon-based servers for the most demanding x86 workloads, and/or utilizing blade servers for mission-critical computing.
Humanitarian/Environmental Impact
With their vast computing capabilities, Itanium-based systems are serving as the engines for projects that are changing the world for the better, such as modeling and prediction for weather, ecology, health, energy, and other vital research areas. At the same time, organizations that provide valuable services to society often depend on the reliability and performance of Itanium-based systems to support their important work. This category recognizes an organisation whose use of Itanium-based systems is making a considerable, positive impact upon society or the environment.
Best New Application
Applications are the tools that unlock the true potential of any processor architecture. In addition to supporting a wide variety of mission-critical operating systems, the Itanium architecture's application ecosystem covers every niche of mission-critical computing. This category highlights the software solutions being developed that best fulfill an industry need while effectively harnessing the capabilities inherent in Itanium-based systems.
HP and Intel would like to thank our distinguished panel of judges for their participation: Jose Luis Gonzalez, COMPUTAEX; Thomas Gengenbach, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology; Carlos Murino, CESGA; Sverre Jarp, CERN OpenLab; David Kanter, Real World Technologies; and Anders Bjorlin, Kiwok.
Send any and all questions about the Mission-Critical Innovation Awards program and Celebration Event via email.
