Business Intelligence Solutions on the IBM System x3850 X5

Business Intelligence (BI) is defined as the technology used to extract useful information from the vast amount of data that a business has been collecting over time. The information extracted can then be used by decision makers to guide their business to success.

IBM® builds, tests, and publishes reference configurations to provide clients with guidelines when sizing their BI configurations, and with the release of the new eX5 servers with more processors and memory than ever before in an x86 platform, this IBM Redguide™ shows you how you can get the most out of one of these high-performance servers in a BI configuration. The eX5 servers allow you to scale to new highs in performance, process your cubes fast, and get query results even faster.
IBM has tested and is releasing new configurations built using these key components:

-- IBM System x3850 X5
-- IBM System Storage™ DS5000
-- Microsoft® Windows® Server 2008 R2
-- Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2

This Redguide is the third in a series that describes Business Intelligence reference configurations on 4-socket IBM x3850 X5 running Intel® Xeon 7500 series processors. The first two Redguides™ covered reference configurations on IBM x3850 M2 and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008.

Executive overview
Introduction
Solution architecture
Workload description
Reference configurations
Scaling results
Performance metrics
Summary
Appendix
References
The team that wrote this guide

Related product families

Product families related to this document are the following:

• 4-Socket Rack Servers
• Microsoft SQL Server
• Mission Critical Servers