Why System z for virtualisation?
Virtualisation has become the buzz word for businesses wanting to lower their total costs of ownership and improve reliability and flexibility. But, how does virtualisation technology work? And how is System z an important part of the picture?
The power of virtualisation
In simple terms, virtualisation offers a way to help consolidate a large number of individual small machines on one larger server, easing manageability and more efficiently using system resources by allowing them to be prioritized and allocated to the workloads needing them most at any given point in time. Thus, you will reduce the need to overprovision for individual workload spikes. Partitioning and virtualisation are complementary technologies that are most effective when combined but it is very important to understand the distinction between the two. Partitioning provides the ability to divide physical system resources into a number of distinct, isolated regions that operate independently from each other. In general, there is a one-to-one relationship between a physical resource and the region or logical partition it is assigned to, creating the equivalent of a "box within a box." All the physical pieces behave and perform exactly as they do if partitioning were not present.
Virtualisation takes this concept one step further in that it provides the ability to simulate the availability of hardware that may not be present in sufficient amount—or at all! Virtualisation uses the available physical resources as a shared pool to emulate missing physical resources. Virtualisation is capable of very fine control over how and to what extent a physical resource is used by a specific virtual machine or server.
Customer success stories
Companies around the world, across a wide range of industries, are benefiting from the power of virtualisation on System z:
Swiss company achieves flexibility and reduces TCO (US)
Swisscom met the challenge to build a highly reliable and secure e-business foundation to help achieve long-term business objectives and accommodate future growth with a Virtual Linux server solution leveraging IBM z/VM and IBM Integrated Facility for Linux.
ESAG powers its way forward with Linux and System z (US)
In the energy and utilities industry, ESAG experienced significant cost reductions and improved control over business critical applications and disaster recovery capabilities by consolidating SAP and database servers using Linux for System z and z/VM virtualisation technology.
