The System i family is designed to pool resources and optimize their use across multiple application environments and operating systems. Through advanced Micro-Partitioning (LPAR) capabilities, IBM i platforms support running IBM i, AIX, Linux and Windows (via iSCSI) at the same time on a single server — giving companies the freedom to run a wide variety of business applications without the costs and complexity often associated with managing multiple physical servers.
A single partition acts as a completely separate IBM i, Linux, or AIX system. With the capacity to support up to ten dynamic LPARs per processor, System i offerings can help simplify IT infrastructures by allowing companies to deploy new applications and consolidate operations on a single, highly flexible, resilient server. LPAR enables System i offerings to adjust pooled processor resources automatically across operating systems by borrowing processing power from idle partitions to help handle high transaction volumes in other partitions. Consolidating your systems with LPAR can help cut operational costs, improve availability management and service levels, quickly deploy applications, increase your ability to rationalize and modernize networks, and centralize international operations.
System i offerings deliver an advanced storage architecture that provides more flexibility than conventional UNIX, Windows and Linux server implementations. With the System i offering, all disks can be managed as a single pool of RAID-5 or mirrored, protected storage—helping to simplify data administration and improve productivity by boosting storage utilization rates. One pool of disk drives can be managed by IBM i and space can be allocated to each of the multiple operating systems. One consolidated backup can greatly reduce the costs and effort to protect company data stored in applications on a variety of servers. Through storage virtualization, the System i offering can deliver excellent performance to multiple applications, maximize the utilization of the storage resources, and reduce the storage management costs typically associated with server farms.
Logical partitions can also use virtual Ethernet technology on the System i offering. Over 4,000 individual virtual networks can be defined to provide fast (up to 1Gbit/second), very secure connections among these multiple operating systems, for effective application-to-application communications.
In a white paper based on interviews with customers that have simplified their infrastructure, IDC found strong return on investment, significant cost savings, and short payback time by consolidating Windows, Linux, and AIX applications on IBM i platforms
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