Active Memory Expansion: Overview and Usage Guide

IBM’s POWER7™ systems with AIX® feature Active Memory™ Expansion, a new technology for expanding a system’s effective memory capacity. Active Memory Expansion employs memory compression technology to transparently compress in-memory data, allowing more data to be placed into memory and thus expanding the memory capacity of POWER7 systems. Utilizing Active Memory Expansion can improve system utilization and increase a system’s throughput.

This paper provides an overview of POWER7’s Active Memory Expansion technology, as well as guidance on how to deploy and monitor workloads with Active Memory Expansion.