IBM System x3650 M2 With Nehalem ProcessorIBM’s new generation System x3650 M2 features the “Nehalem” processor
The Intel® Xeon® 5500 series processor is designed to adapt to the application being run on it by adjusting processing power and performance to match the requirements of the application.
For businesses, the benefit is that energy costs match the server usage, not simply the fact that the server is powered on.
Each IBM System x3650 M2 will have 16 memory slots allowing a total of 128Gb of DDR3 memory.
IBM has redesigned the interaction between memory and processor such that the memory controller is now inside the processor.
The result of the new design is 50% less latency over the previous generation and faster processing of application workloads.
The number of storage bays in the new x3650 M2 has been increased to 12 to cater for environments that require up to 3.6Tb of internal storage. This improvement means that additional external storage doesn’t need to be purchased and maintenance paid. The ability to add anywhere between 2 and 12 drives (which can be SAS or SATA attached or Solid State) means that there is flexibility to design each server to meet an exact disk requirement.
IBM has released the 50Gb High IOP Solid State Drives into the market
These drives deliver greater performance than standard hard disk drives and are perfect for “high spindle count” applications.
While operating, Solid State Drives use 81% less power than the equivalent sized SAS Drive, meaning savings in ongoing power and cooling costs. Downtime due to disk failure can be reduced because Solid State Drives provide 3 times the availability of conventional drives and, in the event of failure can be hot swapped without downtime.
All IBM rack mount servers are designed to have no single point of failure. Hot swappable features; redundant power supplies, 6 fans, 4Gb Ethernet controllers and multipathing mean that in the event of a failure, the server can still continue to function. Light path diagnostics enable an engineer to easily pinpoint the cause of a failure and in some cases it can be repaired while the machine is still in use.
