• Capitalizing on its experience as the designer and maker of Europe’s largest supercomputer, Bull affirms its unique expertise in server technologies
• Bull announces that the new dual-core Intel® Itanium® 2 processor (formerly codenamed Montecito) is now available on its new NovaScale 3005 and NovaScale 5005 series

Mid July, Bull announced that the Dual-Core Intel® Itanium® 2 processor (formerly codenamed "Montecito") was available on its new NovaScale 3005 and NovaScale 5005 servers for platform shipment beginning in late August. This underlined the ability of the NovaScale server family to host several generations of Intel processors, and so protecting NovaScale customers’ initial investments.

"Our long-standing relationship provides us with early access to new Intel technologies and enables us to integrate new Intel processors quickly into our server line. We have found the performance and reliability gains of the new Dual-Core Intel® Itanium® 2 processor to be outstanding and, combined with Intel® Virtualization Technology, offer enterprise and HPC customers a truly advanced, open and scalable IT infrastructure. That's why Bull customers can already take advantage of powerful Bull NovaScale servers based on Dual-Core Intel® Itanium® 2 processors" said Michel Lepert, General Manager of Bull Products and Systems activities.

Higher levels of performance and density, lower electricity consumption and thermal output
Equipped with Dual-Core Intel® Itanium® 2 processor 9000 series, the NovaScale 3005 and 5005 series deliver much improved price/performance ratios, while the lower electricity consumption and heat output from the new processors offers two and half times better performance per watt compared to previous generation Intel® Itanium® 2 processors.

Bull, through its long-established and recognized know-how in building enterprise open systems and mainframes, has focused its R&D investments to enable the development of innovative enterprise-class Intel® Itanium® 2 processor server families. The resulting technology will contribute to reinforcing Bull’s product range, as well as its position as a key Intel® Itanium® 2 based server supplier. These investments have given Bull a leading edge in the mastering of complex IT infrastructures, which are the cornerstone of its development strategy.

“With the introduction of the dual-core Intel® Itanium® 2 processors as part of the Bull NovaScale server line, a new dimension in enterprise IT is born. This provides more flexible, energy-efficient, higher performance and more reliable solutions. This opens up new prospects for implementing large-scale applications and for server consolidation, particularly with Intel Virtualization Technology,” said Kirk Skaugen, vice president, digital enterprise group, Intel. ”Bull has confirmed its ability to build enterprise-class servers using the best standards-based technologies”.

A commitment
IT infrastructures are increasingly handling customers’ mission-critical activities, to the extent that any service interruption has an immediate and negative impact on the revenues or production capacity of the enterprise.
Therefore, for European customers seeking 24/7 operating capacity allied with very high levels of availability, for over five years now Bull has been offering premium high-availability services under the framework of its HA999 contract, the cornerstone of this highly specialized offering. In fact, Bull is one of the very few service providers to make a contractual commitment to a specific number of hours of availability (in this case, 99.9%).

Guaranteeing 99.9% availability that effectively equates to a cumulative weekly rate of just four hours downtime over 4,380 hours of production
The mechanism Bull deploys is very simple and highly effective. A local, dedicated, technical team, led by a Technical Account Manager (a TAM) is nominated. The customer’s systems are linked up to the technical center at Grenoble, France, specialized in high-availability technologies. Continuous surveillance by experts in this field have enabled some systems under HA999 contracts to remain in continuous operation, without a break, for more than three years. This center is operational 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and uses powerful and secure IT tools developed by Bull. It provides these services to anywhere in Europe.

Today more than 400 systems and their storage environments are continuously monitored by the center, which in turn constitutes a valuable technological showcase for the expertise of Bull teams in the area of high-availability services. Among the European customers who have opted for the HA999 contract are major organizations seeking to provide users and customers with a guarantee of continuous remote (Web) access and businesses in the utility distribution sector with obligations to fulfill service requirements however great the demands made on the system in terms of volume, as well as financial institutions, for whom guaranteed unfailing continuous operation for financial transactions is essential.