IBM Opens Up Design of Its Blade Servers
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International Business Machines Corp. (IBM.N: Quote, Profile, Research) said it is making the design of its &quot;blade&quot; computer servers widely available, in a move designed to gain wider
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Dell is back in the blade server ring with the introduction of its PowerEdge 1855 blade servers. The company is hoping to prove to customers that its new blades have significant cost savings and performance
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IBM announced last Friday a lower-cost blade server option--a pared-down chassis geared for small and midsize businesses. The new Express version of IBM&#39;s BladeCenter chassis still can accommodate as many
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In 2005, IBM plans to bring a significant feature from higher-end servers to the next generation of its PowerPC 970 processor line used in Apple Computer machines and Big Blue&#39;s own blade servers.
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fw3 writes &quot;Information week is reporting that IBM and Intel are opening up the standards for the eServer BladeCenter. &#39;The companies will make available the design specifications for IBM&#39;s eServer BladeCenter product.
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InfoWorld - Dell Computer re-energized its enterprise-class blade server strategy on Monday, rolling out a new architecture that supports as many as 10 servers in a seven-unit chassis that can fit into a standard-size rack.
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Dell on Monday&#160;added a new series of blade products to its PowerEdge server line, expanding its presence in a market dominated by rivals IBM and Hewlett-Packard.The PowerEdge M-Series of blades includes the fastest-performing and most power-efficient blade servers the company has, said Mike Roberts, senior product planning manager for Dell.The PowerEdge M1000E, a 10U enclosure, will support the new Intel-based PowerEdge M600 and Advanced Micro Devices-based PowerEdge M605 blade servers, also announced Monday.The M1000E enclosure supports a range of network connectivity options, including modules for Ethernet, Fibre Channel, and InfiniBand connectivity. The enclosure allows customers to upgrade or stack up on network hardware to boost networking speed.The PowerEdge M600 blade server is a dual-socket server that supports up to two quad-core Intel Xeon processors, including processors in the Xeon 5400 series running at up to 3.16GHz. The dual-socket PowerEdge M605 servers support dual-core Opteron 2000 series processors running at up to 3GHz. Both blades support Windows Server 2003 and Linux OSes.Targeted at data centers, the PowerEdge M1000E enclosure is priced at $5,999, and the blades start at $1,849. The products will be available worldwide starting Monday.Dell&#39;s OpenManage systems management technology, which will be bundled with the blades, includes energy management tools. Capabilities include real-time power reporting and the ability to set power usage by blade.Power efficiency in blade servers is an important consideration for those looking to upgrade data centers, said Richard Doherty, cofounder and director of Envisioneering Group. Energy costs have become a big factor in considering hardware for data centers, and companies are taking a closer look at reducing their carbon footprints, Doherty said.&quot;Going greener can be a reason for an upgrade,&quot; Doherty said.The new blade server gives Dell an opportunity to catch up with HP and IBM blade products, especially in small data centers, Doherty said. Dell&#39;s PowerEdge M-Series will compete with IBM&#39;s BladeCenter H and HP&#39;s BladeSystem c-Class blades.In addition, the new blade servers will need strong management tools in order to succeed, Doherty said. Dell in the past has announced service and support initiatives that haven&#39;t panned out, and the company&#39;s OpenManage system management tools are not as strong as autonomic computing offerings from HP and IBM, Doherty said.System management is a big concern for data centers, and customers are looking for the ability to manage systems without the need for additional IT engineers, Doherty said.
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IBM Corp. bolstered the new eServer i5 server lineup with the i5 550, a new system based on the Power 5 chip that can run multiple operating systems.
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Dell gets set to roll out its PowerEdge 1855 blade server line a home-grown design, this month.
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IBM (NYSE: IBM) has announced a low-cost blade server chassis, along with several new "business-in-a-box" packages for a wide range of industries, including the growing bioinformatics sector.
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I.B.M. plans to announce that it will share the designs and technology for a fast-growing line of computers known as blade servers.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM announced an upgraded version of itsÂ blade server based on the Cell processorÂ on Wednesday, adding memory and data throughput for better performance on high-end applications, such as graphics and finance. IBM also shaved the size of the server so users can fit 14 of the new IBM BladeCenter QS21s into each chassis, compared to seven units of its predecessor, the QS20. The new version can also function in a diverse blade environment, working alongside computers based on the x86 or PowerPC chip architecture to assign workloads to the most efficient platform, said Paula Richards, product line manager for Cell systems at IBM. "We're seeing many applications where users want to actually marry a quad-core Intel or AMD blade with a Cell blade, so they can use the standard blade for basic workloads, then push their mission-critical, exotic applications off to the Cell platform," Richards said. IBM will begin selling the QS21 in October to users in industries that need to run visual computing tasks, such as 3D rendering, and time-critical jobs like compression and encryption.Â The system relies on the Cell Broadband Engine processor, created for Sony Computer Entertainment's PlayStation 3 gaming system by the consortium of IBM, Sony, and Toshiba. The QS21 features two 3.2 GHz Cell processors, dual Gigabit Ethernet networking, and Red Hat's Enterprise Linux 5.1 OS. At its maximum density in high-performance computing clusters, the system can run as fast as 6.4 TFLOPS (tera floating point operations per second) in a BladeCenter H chassis, or 25.8 TFLOPS in a 42U rack. "We're not trying to be a general purpose platform here. If you want to run your monthly statements or ERP, that's not what this is about," said Richards. "This is for time-critical, highly intense workloads like financial applications, digital video surveillance, medical imaging, or even digital media and entertainment. Jobs where time is money." The product will supplement IBM's lineup of blade servers, which also includes products running on IBM's PowerPC chips, Intel's Xeon or Core 2 Duo chips, andÂ AMD's Opteron processor. By upgrading the performance of the Cell version of the BladeCenter, IBM will be able to reach more corners of the highly specialized field of high-performance computing, one analyst said. Users buy the Xeon and Opteron BladeCenters for general purpose computing, the PowerPC BladeCenter for jobs in a Unix environment, and the Cell BladeCenter for compute-intensive applications like signal processing and image analysis, including designs from Mercury Computer Systems, a military and aerospace industry contractor, said Nathan Brookwood, an analyst with Insight 64. "They all do different things, so this is a technology update instead of a big change in positioning," Brookwood said. In concert with the QS21, IBM announced version 3.0 of its SDK for Multicore Acceleration, designed to streamline the process of application development for the new platform. IBM will launch the SDK for Multicore Acceleration on October 19, and launch the QS21 on October 26.
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Dell has announced a dense blade server designed for enterprises with space-tight, hard-to-cool data centres. The PowerEdge 1855 can pack as many as 10 blade servers in a 7U-sized
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To move the blade server market from the enterprise to small and midsize businesses, IBM on Friday unveiled a new BladeCenter chassis and new blade solutions for SMBs.
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InfoWorld - Dell Computer re-energized its enterprise-class blade server strategy on Monday, rolling out a new architecture that supports up to 10 servers in a seven-unit chassis that can fit into a standard-size rack.
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Dell has introduced its new PowerEdge 1855 blade servers, which it says combine enterprise-class features with increased density and lower cost than traditional Dell 1U rack servers to deliver an advantaged platform for data center computing.
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IBM on Tuesday unveiled the eServer i5 550, a new addition to its Power 5-based lineup that it&#39;s aiming at mid-sized business.