This IDC white paper highlights how IBM eX5 systems with MAX5 memory technology play a significant role in increasing the value of memory dense servers.
Comparing Sidecar-less Service Mesh from Cilium and Istio
The Value of Memory-Dense Servers IBMs System x MAX5 for Its eX5 Server Family
1. WHITE P APER
The Value of Memory-Dense Servers: IBM's System x MAX5
for Its eX5 Server Family
Sponsored by: IBM
Michelle Bailey
March 2010
IDC OPINION
www.idc.com
The technology industry has reached a crossroads. After more than a decade of
physical server sprawl, nearly exponential growth in storage, and a proliferation of
network technologies, IT organizations are now facing tremendous challenges in
planning for a future enterprise architecture that is less expensive, less complex, and
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more agile than today's infrastructure. At the core of this reinvention is virtualization
and, increasingly, a converged set of IT infrastructure that is built on a service-centric
approach to supporting the business. This new technology cycle is squarely aimed at
improving utilization rates, driving efficiency across the datacenter, and simplifying
deployment and ongoing maintenance in order to ultimately shorten time to market
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and optimize the business value from IT investments.
Many IT organizations are well on their way to creating a more flexible and
responsive enterprise architecture. Server virtualization has quickly become
mainstream and is the foundational platform for the datacenter. More than 50% of all
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server workloads are now deployed on virtual machines, and this is driving a sea
change in the types of technologies that IT organizations are procuring and
configuring and their approach to IT processes and practices.
We have already seen customers move toward more richly configured servers to
maximize the number of virtual machines (VMs) consolidated per physical server. The
correct balance of processor, memory, and I/O is critical in architecting an effective
virtualization solution. Initially, the emphasis on building physical systems for virtual
machines focused on multicore processors. However, with the maturity in
virtualization, most IT organizations now report that the single greatest limiter in
driving higher VM densities is tied to the amount of memory that their virtual machines
can access. Servers that were previously built to support single applications have
become inadequate in meeting the virtualization goals of customers.
Prior to virtualization, only the most demanding workloads required high memory
footprints — large databases, OLTP applications, and enterprise ERP and CRM
solutions. Today, because each virtual machine requires its own memory to ensure
consistent application performance, systems with large memory capabilities become
essential. As a result, new x86-based servers are coming to market that can
massively expand memory capacities.