Overview
Based on the 5th generation of IBM® Enterprise X-Architecture®, IBM x86 enterprise systems set new standards for memory capacity, storage flexibility, proactive system management and system reliability. And with the latest IBM eX5 enterprise systems featuring the Intel® Xeon® processor E7 family, larger and more efficient memory options and high IOPS storage, you can now benefit from even greater levels of leadership performance, scalability and reliability for your mission-critical, enterprise-class workloads. DB2® is uniquely designed to exploit these enhancements, with advanced optimizations of both eX5 and Intel’s processor architecture. The result is a powerful solution that helps businesses lower costs while delivering greater value. And DB2 includes a number of enhancements that simplify the movement of applications to DB2 and leverage existing skills. Finally, DB2 is ideally suited for use with the IBM WebSphere®, IBM InfoSphere™, IBM FileNet® and IBM Cognos® product families — in fact, it powers more than 100 IBM products, including IBM InfoSphere Warehouse.
DB2 offers outstanding performance, with a great record in standard industry benchmarks. See "Proven strategies for uncovering cost savings with IBM DB2" for more information.
The self-tuning memory manager in DB2 automatically leverages the unprecedented amounts of cost-effective, dense memory in the IBM MAX5 memory expansion modules - up to two times more memory than previous eX5 systems. This results in higher performance at lower cost for databases that are memory-hungry.
With its unique deep compression technology, it is not unusual to see significant storage savings. The end result is that businesses can operate with less storage hardware, reducing energy consumption, cooling and floor space resources.
DB2 pureXML® revolutionizes the management of XML data. It eliminates much of the work typically involved in managing XML data and it serves data at blazing speed. It also allows you to analyze information in XML data in ways that have previously not been possible.
eXFlash, another exclusive eX5 innovation, combines solid-state disk technology with a high-speed controller architecture to bring far greater performance at lower cost for I/O intensive data. DB2's industry-leading autonomics and cost-based optimizer automatically adapt to get the most performance boost from eXFlash, with 10x or more improvement possible. Deep compression expands the amount of data that eXFlash can store. Database administration is simplified with monitoring capabilities to detect hot DB2 objects, support for online moves, and local indexes for range partitions. Read Unleashing the Value of Solid-State Drives for DB2 Workloads for more information.
With licensing terms that are virtual-machine friendly, DB2 is optimized to work with leading virtualization solutions, including VMware®. Databases can be deployed as virtual appliances, simplifying server deployment and accelerating time to solution. Read the benchmark (PDF, 10KB) about how the IBM System x3850 X5 demonstrates leadership performance for virtualization applications with overall highest SPECvirt score achieved with VMware ESX Server.
DB2 is smarter. It helps lower the cost of managing data by automating administration, increasing storage efficiency, improving performance and simplifying the deployment of virtual appliances. For example, by automating tasks such as memory allocation, storage management and business policy maintenance, DB2 is able to perform many management tasks itself, freeing up DBAs to focus on new projects. IBM Optim solutions help you design, develop, deploy, operate, optimize and govern enterprise data throughout its lifecycle.
IT managers know that attacking software and administration costs is a key consideration. DB2 minimizes acquisition and operating costs while promoting greater productivity. That's why there is so much interest in how easy it is to move to DB2. DB2 includes a number of features that simplify the movement of applications from Oracle Database to DB2. When it comes to many database and development features-including concurrency models, SQL dialects, data types, procedural languages, packages and scripting languages, differences are the exception rather than the rule. And applications moved to DB2 run with full native execution, delivering high performance.
DB2 is at the forefront of delivering innovations on eX5 servers. For more than a decade, DB2 has had a deep partnership with IBM X-Architecture and Intel, jointly collaborating to optimize enterprise solutions: complete, cost-effective, performance-optimized stacks of IBM Information Management software running on servers powered by Intel® Xeon® processors. In fact, IBM System x3850 X5 running DB2 achieved more than 3 million transactions per minute on TPC-C benchmark1—setting industry milestone for x86-64 performance!
"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 Budzinski, VP and GM, WhereScape USA.
1Benchmark results are as of 22 February 2012: Source: Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC), www.tpc.org. (link resides out of ibm.com) IBM System x3850 server (4 processors/40 cores/80 threads); 3,014,684 tpmC; .59 USD per tpmC; available 9/22/2011.