Supercharging the data warehouse while keeping costs down

With rapid data growth straining data warehouses and analytics engines, executing business intelligence queries can be very time-consuming. But most businesses can’t wait—they need answers in real time.

Boosting performance with in-memory processing

IBM® Informix® Warehouse Accelerator (IWA) improves response times dramatically through proprietary compression, scalable processor cache–conscious algorithms, and highly accessible in-memory data. IWA loads warehouse data completely into system memory in a compressed form. IWA exploits 128-bit registers and Streaming SIMD Extension (SSE) technology in Intel® Xeon® processors to accelerate operations on the in-memory compressed data and scan billions of rows in seconds.

But what happens as data continues to grow? Is it necessary to increase memory capacity by purchasing increasingly high-end servers with more memory or scale out to a large cluster? Not if the organization uses IBM System x® MAX5 memory expansion technology.

Doubling memory without adding more processors

MAX5 technology is designed to enhance the memory capacity of the IBM System x eX5 platform. This scalable 1U memory expansion system delivers an additional 32 DIMM slots to IBM System x3850 X5 and x3690 X5 servers powered by Intel Xeon processors. With MAX5, an organization can add 50 to 100 percent more memory to a System x eX5 server—up to a total of 6 TB per server.

Factor in IWA compression rates of as much as 5:1, and an organization can put terabytes of warehouse data completely in memory on one very cost-effective server. No additional server CPUs are needed as the warehouse scales because each MAX5 system contains a memory controller to expand memory beyond the industry standard. And Informix pricing is based on processor-value unit rather than database size, so there are no additional Informix licensing fees. The bottom line: increased business agility at low cost.

To read about IWA performance testing, visit:

http://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/data/sw-library/informix/whitepapers/Intel-IWA-performance.pdf