IBM Cuts Blade Servers for SMBs
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IBM Friday sharpened it blade offerings to target small and midsize businesses with the announcement of new hardware and software bundles.
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IBM Corp will today announce that it will move its slower 1.5GHz Power5 processors into its eServer p5 520 and 550 servers in an attempt to make the &quot;Squadron&quot; servers more appealing to customers using rival Sun Microsystems Inc&#39;s Sparc/Solaris boxes and
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(InfoWorld) - IBM will license its technology for cooling servers with water instead of air to a Chicago-area company. Panduit, a global networking and electrical manufacturer, will license IBM's Rear Door Heat eXchanger product, a five-inch deep cooling door to be mounted on the back of a conventional server rack in a data center. Water courses through the door, cooling the processors in the server hardware. IBM's water-cooled system reduces server heat output in data centers by up to 55 percent, compared to air-cooled technology, said Tom Bradicich, chief technology officer for IBM's BladeCenter and System x server product lines. The heat exchanger isÂ part of IBM's CoolBlue portfolioÂ of products to manage data centers more cost-effectively, reducing the heat generated by the increased processing power of servers and the increased number of servers crowded into datacenters. Datacenter operators who use fans for cooling have been slow to embrace water cooling because "it's difficult to do water cooling inexpensively," Bradicich said Wednesday in an interview. But over the last 18 months, the growth of datacenters running more and more industry-standard x-86 type servers "has been getting extremely out of hand," he said. The growth drives up demand for electricity to run more powerful computers and to keep the equipment cool. High energy costs have made water-cooled solutions more viable. Water cooling is getting a closer look from some IT administrators, but they still have some reservations about it, said Michael Bell, a GartnerÂ analyst, in a Wednesday interview. Water cooling can be initially more expensive to introduce into a datacenter than air cooling, and IT managers worry about water systems leaking and causing damage, Bell said. Some are sticking their toe in the water-cooling pool cautiously, clustering their highest powered servers into one part of their data centers and introducing water-cooled technology only in that area. But as datacenter electricity bills grow, "I think we'll see water usage coming more into play," he said, adding that it now costs data centers as much to cool a server as to power it. IBM rival Hewlett-PackardÂ introduced a water-based cooling systemÂ for its high-density servers in January. Also in January, blade server maker Egenera introduced a product called CoolFrame that integrates Liebert's X-Treme Density cooling technology into a blade architecture. Liebert is a division of Ohio-based Emerson Electric.
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IBM said it plans to build a blade server system for small to medium-sized businesses.
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The IBM announcement is being made in collaboration with Intel. Under an agreement reached two years ago, the companies have worked together to design and manufacture blade servers.
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IBM announced yesterday it has officially begun production of the 65nm version of the revolutionary successor to the Power CPU, which now powers some BladeCenter servers and, of course, Sony's PlayStation 3. To lower power consumption while at the same time reducing current leakage, IBM found itself adopting a novel approach, as the company itself shamelessly admitted.
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The City of Burbank migrated to new IBM (NYSE: IBM) BladeCenter servers, improving data center performance by 30 percent and, as a result, reduced IT costs dramatically.
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IBM on Friday unveiled new low-cost storage servers that the computer giant&#39;s using to undercut wares from rivals Hewlett-Packard and Dell/EMC in the small- and mid-sized markets.
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International Business Machines cut about 1,570 jobs to help improve profit margins in its technology services unit.
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International Business Machines  Corp.  said it laid off about 1,570 employees on  Wednesday in its computer services business in the United  States, part of a plan to trim costs in the unit.
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Express version of BladeCenter chassis accommodates up to 14 dual-processor servers but costs under $1,000 instead of about $2,800.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM Corp. on Wednesday unveiled three server offerings aimed at helping companies of all sizes consolidate Web-tier Linux servers in their IT environments. In a press conference at the Linuxworld OpenSolutions Summit in New York, Scott Handy, vice president of worldwide Linux strategy for IBM, said the new offerings will help customers consolidate the more than 1.6 million Linux servers that are present in both heterogeneous and open-source IT environments. The new servers are for small and midsize businesses as well as the enterprise market. The highest end of the three new offerings, the IBM System p5 560Q, includes advanced virtualization features, such as IBM's Advanced Power Virtualization, which runs multiple partitions per processor. This allows a customer to consolidate 320 x86-based Linux Web servers on to just one rack of five of the new servers, Handy said. For small and midsize businesses, IBM is offering Linux server consolidation offerings on its blade servers, Handy said. For medium-size companies, the company unveiled the BladeCenter JS21 for Web Serving Farms. JS21 is a BladeCenter chassis with 14 JS21 blades, and also includes IBM's Advanced Power Virtualization. Customers can consolidate 168 Linux x86 servers onto just one BladeCenter Chassis with 14 blades, according to IBM. Small businesses also can consolidate 12 x86 Linux servers on IBM Bladecenter, using one or two JS21 blades and Advanced Power Virtualization, according to IBM. Another option for small businesses is to consolidate the same amount of Linux servers onto a quad-core System p5 505Q Express server, the company said. In addition to the new consolidation offerings, which Handy said customers requested, IBM also expanded a deal with Novell Inc. to offer an open-source software stack that includes Suse Linux to its Power and BladeCenter servers. The Integrated Stack for Suse Linux Enterprise combines Novell's Linux OS with a license-free version of IBM WebSphere Application Server Community Edition with Web-tier clustering support and IBM DB2 Express-C, a community version of IBM's database server. It also includes software from Centeris, the Likewise Management Suite, which enables system administrators to manage Linux servers from within an existing Windows server environment, IBM said. The offering previously had only been available for IBM's x line of servers. Handy said IBM has shipped more than 1,000 servers with the Integrated Stack for Suse Linux Enterprise since it became generally available in the third quarter of 2006. The software suite was announced at Linuxworld Boston last April, he added.
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InfoWorld - IBM on Friday announced it has signed up 115 companies since early September to develop for its eServer BladeCenter open specification it co-authored with Intel.
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Blade servers, generally intended for large data centers, might become more common in smaller businesses, if a new blade system from IBM catches on. Previewed on Wednesday, Big Blue&#39;s BladeCenter S can help to reduce by up to 80 percent the 25 to 45 physical servers that an average midsize company has, according to IBM.
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Sun Microsystems launched a new blade server system today that is capable, it says, of providing up to twice the memory and input/output capacity of rival systems. The powerful new server is part of Sun&#39;s attempt to increase its share of the fast-growing blade market, which has been dominated until now by IBM and HP.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM Corp. is adding to its blade server line with an upcoming model targeted at small-to-medium-sized businesses. The BladeCenter S system is packaged to include server, storage, input-output connections to a network and software integrated into a single chassis. IBM declined to provide pricing information but said it plans to begin shipping the product in the fourth quarter. "BladeCenter S simplifies IT for our customers," said Alex Yost, vice president and business line executive for IBM's blade products. "Set up is three easy steps: Take it out of the box, plug it in and run the wizard to get it up and running, much like you might do a PC today." The new model is small enough to sit on a desktop, runs on standard 110- or 220-volt electrical current, requires no raised floor, and features simplified cabling compared to other servers, said Yost. A BladeCenter S system can include up to six blade servers and will include software for running a typical office environment, such as antivirus protection, VOIP (Voice over IP) phone service, e-mail and file-print functions. IBM cited an IDC research forecast showing blade computer market revenue growing to US$11 billion by 2010, from $3 billion in 2005. IDC research also forecasts blade sales to account for 18.1 percent of all server sales by 2011, from 6.6 percent this year. Blades are appealing to data center managers because they are smaller and more energy efficient than rack servers. But in the competition among server vendors for blade sales, IBM comes in second. Hewlett-Packard Co. held a 40.9 percent share of the global blade server market, while IBM held 35.2 percent, also according to IDC. HP on MondayÂ unwrapped BladeSystem bc2000 and bc2500 machines, claiming they reduce IT management costs while improving data security.
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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.