IBM System x Business Intelligence Solutions for Small-Medium Businesses with Microsoft SQL Server 2008

Business intelligence (BI) can get a lot of attention as companies realize they have a vast amount of data that needs to be analyzed and that can be used to intelligently guide their business decisions going forward.

The issues that companies face today include:
* Data is spread out in different locations and in different formats.
* Data needs to be extracted, transformed, and integrated into one common database to be analyzed.
* When analyzed, reports need to be generated that can help executives make better business decisions.

IBM® has tested BI software components that ship with the Microsoft® SQL Server® product on System x® scale-up servers. In this IBM Redguide publication, we discuss three such tested reference configurations. These configurations highlight the cost-effective standard Intel® Xeon processor-based, server-based scale-up BI solutions by IBM.

Executive summary
Introduction
IBM Business Intelligence solution architecture
SQL Server 2008 performance improvements
IBM BI reference configurations
Conclusions
The team that wrote this guide

Related product families

Product families related to this document are the following:

• 2-Socket Rack Servers
• Microsoft Alliance
• Microsoft SQL Server