NEC White Paper Sample

Delivering mission-critical workloads with predictable levels of scale and reliability and providing application performance that meets service-level agreement (SLA) commitments are all in a day’s work for many IT professionals, as stated at the beginning of this paper. In recent years, the increasingly heavy penetration of x86 servers in enterprises has led to a widespread need to support mission-critical workloads whether it be operating systems such as Microsoft Windows or Linux, workloads such as Microsoft SQL Server databases, virtualization software solutions, or consolidation of workloads on virtualized hardware running aboard scalable x86 servers.

Today’s 24 x 7 x 365 world has raised the bar for the continuous availability of systems, elevating the status of many business applications to mission critical. If those workloads go offline, the downtime results in lost revenue, and business processes come to a halt.

Customers deploying x86 server solutions are increasingly finding out what large system customers have known for decades: A well-established set of best practices can dramatically improve availability, performance, and the ability to meet service-level requirements. Best practices, leveraging real-world experiences from IT professionals, have the potential to dramatically increase the performance levels of scalable x86 servers. Importantly, these best practices will aid in the process of datacenter transformation, as an increasing number of scalable x86 servers support next-generation mission-critical applications and databases.