Buyer’s guide to IT infrastructure
Posted by Mike on Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - 30 views
Best practice in datacentre design dictates that as much IT infrastructure as possible should be virtualised. Doing so improves agility, allowing the IT department to flex resources up and down to meet the demands of the business.
Given that virtualisation is happening, IT departments have a choice: roll out a scale-out architecture using a large volume of x86 servers to run virtual machines, or deploy a scale-up architecture, comprising fewer much larger, and often more expensive, Unix and Linux server boxes over commodity Windows hardware.
IBM’s new z/196 mainframe aims to tackle datacentre complexity by pulling together different applications, or workloads, in a single system. The system comprises a mainframe and Power and x86 blades, which enables the datacentre to run mainframe, Aix and Linux applications in the same floor space.
