DB2 and the Intel® Xeon® Processor

Intel and IBM collaborate to boost performance, lower power consumption and reduce the cost of data

IntelFor more than 15 years, IBM and Intel® have collaborated to optimize enterprise solutions: complete, cost-effective, performance-optimized stacks of IBM Information Management software running on servers powered by Intel® Xeon® processors.

"Intel is excited to see greater than 25x improvement in query processing performance using DB2 10.5 with BLU acceleration over DB2 10.1. To achieve these amazing gains, IBM has taken advantage of the Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) instruction set on Intel® Xeon® processor E5-based systems. Customers running this hardware can now immediately realize dramatically greater performance boost at lower cost per query."

— Pauline Nist, Intel General Manager, Enterprise Software Alliances, Datacenter and Connected Systems Group

Timely, trusted information is the currency of success at all levels of business. But increasing data volumes make it difficult to deliver that information. As data volumes go up, so do the costs of data management.

With IT costs under intense scrutiny, there has never been a better time to upgrade to better performing and more energy-efficient servers. By coupling the latest version of IBM DB2® with servers based on the Intel Xeon processor, organizations can transform data into useful business insights more quickly and deliver all those insights into context, all while lowering costs and power consumption.

When you really consider what’s going on now with Intel’s intelligent performance, you consider that with what IBM is up to with DB2®, goodness, this is not business as usual. This is really game changing technology.

--Mark Budzinksi, VP and GM, WhereScape USA

Organizations running DB2 pureScale on the Intel Xeon processor and IBM System x, can experience near-linear scale-out efficiency for their mission critical applications, while enjoying leading levels of data availability. In other words, organizations can rest assured that they have a solution that will grow to meet their future needs.

The IBM System eX5 is designed with the Intel Xeon Processor E7 product family, which is fine-tuned with built-in Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability (RAS) features and is ready for mission critical application such as DB2. The Intel Xeon processor E7 supports greater that 4-socket implementations and more memory, cores, cache, addressability and I/O channels.

Intel provides IBM Software with multiple performance and time-to-market advantages through:

  • Early access software development platform
  • Roadmaps and future technology disclosures
  • Innovation in security and virtualization technology

We have a long history of working together, creating unique innovation where we can get the best of DB2 working together with the best of Intel. The goal is to have the fastest performance on Intel® processors with the least amount of effort for DB2 development. So we’ve selected the Intel compiler both because of [Intel’s] excellent support and the outstanding performance that it generates. We have delivered a whole new level of innovation on the Intel® Xeon processor.

--Berni Schiefer, Distinguished Engineer, IBM

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