I recently attended the IBM Business Partner Leadership Conference (BPLC), where our sales director, Gareth Pritchard, and I received on behalf of Centiq the fantastic honour of a Beacon Award 2012.

IBM devotes a big part of the BPLC programme to recognize and reward innovation and development by its thousands of worldwide partners.  Only 27 gain the coveted Beacon Award.  To our delight, Centiq received one of them: the Outstanding Optimised Workload Solutions category.

We all like reports. Reports that include graphs and pie charts are even better! One thing we don't always consider is how fresh the data in we are looking at is? In a typical Business Intelligence scenario, the data we can access is normally already a day old. For long-term planning this is probably acceptable, but nowadays is day old data really enough to be competitive? What if manufacturing efficiency suddenly drops in your factory or your online sales suddenly boom and threaten your stoke levels? Do you really want to wait until tomorrow to find that our? SAP don’t think so.

SAP HANA was developed to plug these gaps in reporting (as well as other ventures in the future). HANA stands for "High performance ANalytic Appliance". It uses custom In-Memory computing techniques to offer extremely high query performance. Unlike BWA, HANA supports SQL and MDX giving it far more flexibility. However, like BWA, HANA is an appliance, meaning it can only be ordered from and installed by specialist partners like Centiq.

According to the below report AIX on POWER is still statistically the best OS for maximum uptime. I think that the comparison of the UNIX based operating systems are fair as these servers are likely to be doing similar jobs. The Windows results however are heavily skewed by the number of security patches that have had to be applied to the frontline servers. Is this a measure of the OS or a reflection on the position of the servers in the application stack/network layer?

http://windowsitpro.com/article/articleid/98475/windows-server-the-new-king-of-downtime.html

I would be really interested in a report that compared similar applications (e.g. ERP or database systems) running on AIX, HP-UX, Solaris and windows. 
Relative performance comparisons and benchmarking different systems is something that can be done in a finite amount of time with a lab full of kit. But uptime comparisons rely on surveys and user reports over an extended period of time, and never seem to be from well grouped application categories. If anyone has seen better stats that make more detailed comparison of OS uptime please let me know.

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