In terms of the ability to lead in physical and virtual consolidation, our advantages are clear with leadership x86 innovation. We can trace this leadership back to 2000 where we introduced the X-Architecture and the first scalable x86 16 socket design as well as the first blade to market with BladeCenter. Through 2003 and 2005 we displayed more leadership as the first x86 vendor with over 100 number one industry benchmarks…and the first x86 server with hot swap memory. By 2007, and the introduction of the fourth generation of the X-Architecture we broke another performance barrier as the first x86 vendor to break the one million TPMC threshold in the TPC-C transaction processing benchmark. These breakthroughs have allowed clients to reduce data center assets, costs, power consumption and to better monitor their virtual environments…all in an effort to dramatically improve utilization.
Multiple approaches have emerged as we begin this shirt. We are tuning our own systems – using the flexibility of general purpose systems to optimize them for their business environment. However, as we just saw - the time and effort to do this can be significant. Other approaches have emerged as well. We are taking advantage of the simplicity of appliances and the elasticity of cloud where those approaches make sense. The question is – how can organizations get the best of all three of these options in one system?