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At IBM, we rely on deep business experience, renowned research capabilities, and world-class technology to help businesses move forward via innovation. IBM’s ultimate goal is to provide innovation that matters to you—innovation that helps you solve old problems in new and better ways. However, innovation is only the process; success is the result.
According to IDC1, nearly 70% of IT server spending in 2010 will be on x86 servers. Once, there was a perception in the industry that these servers were suitable primarily for filling low-end computing niches, such as file-and-print, e-mail and departmental serving. IBM was among the first vendors to envision that x86 servers could take on a much broader role. In 1998, recognizing that x86 servers needed many of the same reliability, serviceability, availability, and performance attributes as mainframes and other advanced servers, IBM introduced x86 servers incorporating X-Architecture® technologies. These game-changing technologies, including x86 industry firsts such as Chipkill™ memory protection, light path diagnostics and Predictive Failure Analysis®, helped elevate x86 servers from their limited roles to their present status as mission-critical, mainstream enterprise servers. The competition has been playing catch-up ever since.
This paper describes the evolution of X-Architecture technology and demonstrates how the melding of industry-standard components with IBM innovation produces servers that offer you a unique set of capabilities with which to effectively manage your business. You’ll see why IBM systems equipped with X-Architecture technologies run faster—yet cooler—use less power, and are more reliable, easier to manage and better for virtualization than competitive servers, and offer a lower total cost of ownership (TCO).
Market Trends
Some long-term market trends continue, such as the ever-increasing need for performance. Meanwhile, new trends are emerging, including a greater concern over security and power/thermal issues and a growing interest in virtualization. IBM has been visionary in recognizing these trends early and providing solutions via X-Architecture technology to propel you into the future:
- Memory becomes a key to balanced system performance — As the number of processor cores increase, system resources must keep up to avoid potential bottlenecks. For example, for quad-core processors to achieve maximum performance, they require four times as much memory as single-core processors. IBM, utilizing its decades of experience in designing mainframes and multi-core supercomputers, leads in the design of x86 servers. IBM takes a holistic approach to balanced system design, optimizing its x86 servers to deliver outstanding performance and utility around the processors, memory, I/O, and network fabrics.
- The one-application-per-server paradigm will be broken and utilization becomes the key to data center performance — Even the smallest servers become SMP (symmetrical multiprocessing)-capable via multi-core processors. Many customers have been in a one-application/ one-server deployment model with very low levels of utilization. Utilization will become a direct measure of the ROI of your technology investment. Because of this, IBM is investing in system and data center management technologies to help you achieve higher utilization levels. We will continue to work on developing technologies that will optimize how applications operate. Having better control allows you to proactively move workloads to other assets and temporarily assign bandwidth as needed. This can help you delay the need for more servers, manage electricity usage, assign failover servers for improved redundancy, and so on. Would you rather rely on IBM virtualization technology, which evolved from three decades of experience with mission-critical mainframe virtualization—or hardware and software vendors who are figuring out virtualization as they go?
- Power and thermal efficiency is driven by managing the envelope — IBM continues to invest in developing new tools that allow us to offer servers with better power efficiency and to interact with sensors mounted within servers and elsewhere in the data center. With power reduction comes cooling reduction. Over time, today’s power and thermal issues may no longer be practical concerns for the data center.
- The work of next-generation corporate desktops will be driven by a server — Security concerns will eclipse TCO as the driver of recentralization; server consolidation will spread to desktops via virtual clients. To this end, IBM's Virtual Client solution allows users to enjoy all of the benefits and personal control of a stand-alone desktop—including print capabilities, USB drive support, and audio—while reducing many of the challenges related to current stand-alone desktop environments.
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