IBM licenses technology for water-cooled servers
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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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A win in the nuclear submarine cluster market suggests that IBM's POWER architecture is joining the Linux HPC big leagues.
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originally offered on notebook PCs -- to its Opteron 32- and 64-bit x86 processors for server applications. The technology will help servers to run
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Excess heat generated by elevated processor performance is controlled by Alienware&#39;s exclusive ultra-quiet Liquid Cooling technology, which cools components with specially formulated liquid and gold-plated, pure copper coolers.
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IBM has announced Version 6 of its WebSphere Application Server software, which is designed to protect applications from server downtime and aid enterprise efforts to build a service-oriented architecture.
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(InfoWorld) - IBMÂ unveiled a Web site and IT security software application Thursday as part of its effort to compete with Hewlett-PackardÂ and SunÂ for customers in the fast-growing SMB sector. New customers can share tips on how to migrate from servers to mainframes on the Web site, which acts as an online community for users, system integrators, software vendors, and academic institutions. Existing customers can use the enhanced z/VM virtualization software to support more virtualized memory or use the new Tivoli zSecure V1.8.1 suite to monitor threats and enforce compliance. IBM created the new version of zSecure with technology from itsÂ first-quarter acquisition of Consul Risk Management. That purchase is part of IBM's strategy to spend $100 million toÂ simplify its mainframe platformÂ by 2011, hoping to persuade businesses to buy its System z9 mainframe computers instead of high-end servers. IBM sells an enterprise-class version of its z9 for large corporations and a business-class version for SMBs. Compared to servers running on chips from Sun or Intel, customers can save money by using power-efficient mainframes, said Jim Stallings, general manager of System z for IBM's systems and technology group. "The biggest reason customers are drawn to the mainframe -- a trend we've seen for more than 10 years now -- is power," Stallings said. "Servers running on the faster chips and greater numbers of chips draw an enormous amount of power, and our smaller customers can't get that power. I'm talking about basic electricity." The streamlined architecture of the mainframe makes it attractive to customers who need to process large amounts of information, such as financial services firms and hedge funds, he said. That group is quickly growing to include midrange banks, including the National Bank of the Republic of Belarus and Nexar, an Internet banking company in Belgium. "SMB customers are realizing that they cannot afford to change their infrastructure every two years because it's too expensive. The cost comes not so much in the hardware as in training people to administer it," Stallings said. "Our customers came to us and said, 'We want to migrate more work to the mainframe because of the economics. We're way over the religious debates about which processor is faster -- we don't care -- we need better economics.'" IBM is making a big bet on its mainframe business with the $100 million investment, but the gambit may pay off. In theÂ first quarter of 2007, the company credited strong growth in its software and system z sectors for an 8 percent increase in net income to $1.8 billion and a 6.6 percent increase in revenue to $22 billion, compared to the same period in 2006.
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IBM, one of the key leaders in the enterprise server market, annouced two additions to its family of high storage products yesterday.
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IBM has introduced the BladeCenter Express, a lower-cost blade server chassis targeted toward small and mid-size businesses. The company also unveiled several new business-in-a-box packages
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IBM&#39;s new eServer allows users to run multiple OS environments at the same time to increase efficiency. Customers can purchase the machine based on the processing power they need. The server comes in configurations from one to four-way and ...
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Company says laptop-like technology will be useful in server systems, where it can help companies save on electricity and cooling costs in data centers.
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IBM is fleshing out its On Demand computing strategy with the release later this year of Websphere 6.0, the next incarnation of its flagship application server software.
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In an attempt to grab business from Hewlett-Packard&#39;s and Sun Microsystems&#39; entry-level Unix market, IBM this week plans to introduce a Power5 processor-based server tuned for Linux.
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Seeking an edge in the entry-level computing system space,  IBM (NYSE: IBM) has unveiled a Linux-based  server using the company's Power5 processors. The OpenPower 720 product is being touted as an alternative to basic Unix systems from  HP (NYSE: HPQ) and Sun.
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IBM is looking to get a leg up on the competition with the October 15 launch of eServer 326, a rack-mounted server that supports AMD&#39;s upcoming dual-core 64-bit processor.
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IBM on Friday introduced high-end servers in its pSeries and iSeries lines that include virtualization features and raw power that some experts say put the products on par with offerings from rival Hewlett-Packard Co.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM researchers are counting on a 40-year-old technology to keep modern, state-of-the-art datacenters running cool and allow companies to squeeze more computing power from the electricity they consume. These considerations are more important than ever. The power consumed by a rack of servers has risen from around 5 kilowatts (kW) of power per server rack five years ago to as much as 30 kW today, thanks to the introduction of more powerful processors and denser blade servers. And the power-consumption levels will continue rising in the years ahead. "People want more compute power and we can give it to them because we can package this into a smaller footprint, basically," said Roger Schmidt, chief thermal architect and distinguished engineer at IBM's Server and Workstation Division. The challenge that Schmidt and his colleagues face is how to dissipate the increasing levels of heat these systems generate. "We're working on this all the way from the chip to the datacenter," he said. At the datacenter level, Schmidt sees an expanded role for water cooling as a means to bring heat levels down. Water cooling, which uses small pipes filled with distilled or deionized water to dissipate heat, was first used by IBM to cool mainframe computers during the 1960s. The technology, which was used in more than 90 percent of mainframes by the mid-1980s, was given a second lease on life in 2005, when IBM introduced its line of Cool Blue water-cooling products. One such product is IBM's $4,299 Rear Door Heat eXchanger, which attaches to the rear of a server rack. Four inches thick and weighing about 32 kilograms (70 pounds) when filled with water, the Rear Door Heat eXchanger, can absorb more than half of the heat coming from a server rack, according to IBM. IBM's water-cooling systems, as well asÂ competing products from companies like Hewlett-Packard, offer several benefits for datacenters. Most importantly, water can absorb more heat than air, and the pumps required to circulate water in a cooling system consume less power than air-conditioning systems. And IBM plans to expand its line of water-cooling products in the months ahead. "We've got other enhancements coming out shortly," Schmidt said, declining to elaborate on specific details. One potential enhancement is to extend water cooling from the rear of the server rack to specific components, such as processors -- as was done with some IBM mainframes. "Once you bring water to the rack, you've got a lot of options," Schmidt said. Convincing datacenter operators to pipe water through racks filled with expensive servers and invaluable data is not always easy. The easiest to convince are those IT managers with experience from the days when water-cooled mainframes were the backbone of large corporations, Schmidt said. But many remain nervous at the thought of water-filled pipes coursing through rooms filled with expensive servers and invaluable data -- even though water is already a key component of all datacenters. "Water cooling in datacenters is already there," Schmidt said. "The chilled water that's brought to the air conditioning units? That's water and it's in the pipes right above the server racks. We're just plugging into that to apply that at the rack level."
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By Shyla Sangaran  HAVING problems keeping your servers cool? Well, IBM Corp has introduced a new range of AMD Opteron processor-based servers that incorporate Cool Blue, a cooling technology that helps to improve server power utilisation and reduce energy costs.