As your company grows and as new regulations add pressure on your data center, you may find yourself forced to add more and more server capacity—often escalating the systems management burden and increasing power consumption.With virtualization on IBM System x® and BladeCenter® x86 servers, new workloads do not have to mean new servers. Enhanced with IBM X-Architecture® innovation, IBM x86 servers offer flexible configurations equipped with enhanced memory, high-speed I/O and industry-leading availability and reliability features—a combination designed to help reduce operating costs, simplify management and keep your virtualized infrastructure up and running.
Benefits
With System x and BladeCenter systems, you get:
- Scalable platforms that allow you to pay as you grow
- Highly available technology to help keep your virtual infrastructure up and running
- High-speed I/O that allows you to assign bandwidth as required for your virtualized applications
- The most memory capacity per processor to help you reduce server sprawl and power consumption
- Flexible server configurations so you can choose the one that is right for your business
- Optimized systems for faster time to value
- Open platforms that support a choice of industry-leading hypervisors from Microsoft®, VMware, Red Hat and SUSE
- The ability to consolidate multiple operating systems and software stacks on a single platform
Optimized systems
IBM BladeCenter Foundation for Cloud provides a comprehensive, converged solution that brings together the hardware, software and services needed to quickly establish a robust virtualized environment. With the addition select software such as IBM SmartCloud Entry delivered by IBM Starter Kit for Cloud x86 Edition1, IBM BladeCenter Foundation for Cloud can easily be extended to a private cloud environment.
Workload optimized systems for virtualization provides preconfigured, pretested server configurations optimized to deliver more partitions and larger workloads. Containing the right balance of processing power, memory and I/O, and pretested with VMware, these server configurations can help you reduce your expenses with no trade-offs to business productivity.
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Hypervisors
IBM System x and BladeCenter servers offer open platforms that support a choice of industry-leading hypervisors from Microsoft®, VMware, Red Hat and SUSE.
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Desktop virtualization
Desktop virtualization solutions based on IBM System x and BladeCenter servers coupled with software from IBM, Citrix, VMware or Microsoft can help reduce costs and simplify management associated with traditional desktop computing while increasing performance levels, scalability, operational flexibility, availability and reliability of your desktop infrastructure.
Network virtualization
Virtual Fabric from IBM helps break the I/O bottleneck by allowing you to allocate bandwidth where it’s needed, delivering maximum application agility. Offering a full range of virtualization and convergence capabilities, the same network hardware can act as Ethernet, iSCSI, or Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) with bandwidths allocated in increments from 100 Mb to 1 Gb.
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Storage virtualization
IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller automates provisioning and simplifies management through a single interface for all storage area networks.
virtualization management
IBM Systems Director streamlines the way physical and virtual systems are managed across multiple operating systems and virtualization technologies across IBM and non-IBM platforms.
- IBM Systems Director Standard Edition includes the Express® Edition functions and adds OS deployment, energy management, network control features and upward integration into Microsoft System Center® and VMware vCenter.
- IBM Systems Director VMControl Enterprise Edition for IBM x86 significantly expands the virtualization management capabilities available for IBM System x platforms by delivering comprehensive system pools support for virtual servers deployed within a Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) environment.
IBM BladeCenter Open Fabric Manager simplifies blade administration and provides SAN/LAN management, including virtualized I/O—the simplification of I/O addressing and failover.
IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Virtual Environments (formerly IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Virtual Environments) provides capacity planning and virtualization and cloud monitoring across multiple hypervisor platforms.
IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager for Images delivers hardware independence, virtual and physical image independence, and image conversion capability.
Read customer success stories
HEROLD powers its rapidly growing information business With IBM BladeCenter HX5 and IBM System x3850 X5 servers hosted by IBM
IBM provided a hosted solution built on IBM BladeCenter HX5 and IBM System x3850 X5 servers, powered by the latest Intel® Xeon® processors, with the ability to ramp capacity up and down.
Nihon Matai consolidates SAP applications from 20 to 6 servers, cuts costs by 30%
The existing SAP solutions were running on 20 physical servers. By adopting virtualization, Nihon Matai aimed to improve operational efficiency and enable greater business flexibility. Using Microsoft Hyper-V™ virtualization on IBM System x3550 M2 servers to run multiple instances of Windows Server 2008 R2, it was possible to consolidate the entire former infrastructure to just six physical systems.
WebCrew cuts USD 120,000 from annual costs with IBM BladeCenter and SAN Volume Controller
WebCrew Inc. decided to virtualize and consolidate its existing servers to VMware virtual machines on IBM® BladeCenter® servers, thereby reducing the number of server racks required when the time came to renew its data center contract.
More success stories
1 IBM SmartCloud is the family name for IBM cloud offerings. We refer to our key entry level cloud offering as "IBM SmartCloud Entry delivered by IBM Starter Kit for Cloud x86 Edition", which was the formal name of the product at launch. We will be officially changing the product name to "IBM SmartCloud Entry for System x" at the end of 2Q12.
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