New Business Intelligence Solutions on the IBM System x3850 X5 Using XIV Storage

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. With the release of the new IBM eX5 servers with more processors and memory than ever before in an x86 platform, this Redguide™ shows you how you can get the most out of one of these high-performance servers in a BI configuration. The IBM eX5 servers allow you to scale to new performance highs, process your cubes quickly, and get query results even faster than on previous generation M2 servers.

IBM has tested and is releasing new configurations built using these key components:

• IBM System x3850 X5
  
• IBM XIV® Storage System
  
• Microsoft® Windows® Server 2008 R2
  
• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2
  

This IBM Redguide is the fifth in a series that describes Business Intelligence reference configurations on the 4-socket and 8-socket IBM x3850 X5 platform using both Intel® Xeon E7-8800 series and Intel X7500 series processors. The first four papers covered reference configurations on IBM x3850 M2, IBM System x3850 X5, IBM System Storage® DS5000, IBM System Storage XIV and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 RTM and R2 editions.

Executive overview
Introduction
Solution architecture
Workload description
Reference configurations
Conclusion
Appendix

Related product families

Product families related to this document are the following:

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