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IBM racks up the memory

By Dan Olds, Gabriel Consulting • Get more from this author

Posted in Virtualization, 13th September 2010 13:03 GMT

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VMworld Video Blog While wandering  the floor at the recently concluded VMworld 2010, we stopped by the IBM  booth to take a look at their wares. We ran into an old pal of ours, Bob  Zuber, and he walked us through their MAX 5 memory extension feature.

MAX 5 is essentially a separate board with 32 DIMM sockets that can  be attached to either a four- or eight-socket IBM server via the Intel  QPI (Quick Path Interconnect) and IBM’s own proprietary scalability  interconnect. (X-Architecture is their fancy name for the custom chips  that enable it.)

It’s interesting technology in that the entire memory space,  including the memory on the MAX 5 board, is seen as a single large  memory space and is usable by any VM running on the system. IBM says  that systems with MAX 5 address the biggest problem in large-scale  virtualization today: an acute shortage of memory.

According to the company, there are a lot of benefits that arise from  using MAX 5 other than just running more VMs. Customers can save money  on memory by purchasing a MAX 5 board and more lower-capacity (and lower  cost) DIMMS.

They also make the case that software customers might save on  software costs – assuming that the software in question is licensed by  the socket – and that the extra performance yielded by more memory means  they don’t need to move the packages to bigger systems. To me, this is  more of a corner case; I don’t know how often this alignment of the  stars happens in the real world.

What I am sure about is that flash memory is really fast. Bob shows  us how they’re adding big heaps of flash memory to their systems – up to  16 SSDs in 50 or 200GB chunks. That’s quite a bit of speedy flash  indeed. ®