IBM upgrades blade servers
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SAN FRANCISCO - IBM Corp. will soon begin shipping upgraded models of its HS20 and JS20 blade servers, including a new SCSI (small computer system interface) option for the HS20 that will double the number of SCSI blades that users can fit into a single chassis, the company announced Friday. The Armonk, New York, computer maker also announced new management software for the servers designed to make them cooler and easier to manage.
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IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced the development of a Blade Migration Center aimed at helping clients escape the complexity of multiple incompatible architectures by migrating to a smarter IT platform, IBM BladeCenter.
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(InfoWorld) - Hewlett-Packard Co. is sticking with processors from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) in a new family of blade PCs designed to compete with offerings from IBM Corp. HP announced its BladeSystem bc2000 and bc2500 products on Monday, promising to reduce IT management costs and improve data security for corporate buyers by replacing traditional desktop and notebook PCs. Specialist blade manufacturers like ClearCube Technology Inc. and Wyse Technology Inc. also compete in this segment, as vendors see growing demand from businesses that struggle to balance security and compliance regulations with an increasingly dispersed and outsourced workforce. The new BladeSystems are the desktop version of HP's range of remote computing products. They fit between a blade server arrangement for workers with light computing needs and a blade workstation system for engineers and stock traders. In all three models, the user connects to a remote processor and data storage by accessing the office network with a desk-based access device such as a thin client. Since the main computing resources are located in a single, controlled data center, the corporate IT department can cut management costs by making hardware repairs and applying software patches remotely instead of visiting numerous workers at their desks. HP is selling the bc2000 for US$1,000 per unit when a company buys 10 of the machines. Although that is up to twice the price of a traditional desktop, the IT department can pay off the difference in 12 months of operation, said Tate Davis, CCI product manager for HP's consolidated client infrastructure group. IBM is chasing that same market with its HC10 blade and a TC10 thin client from its partner Devon IT Inc., both launched in May. IBM also targets midrange business users, but uses an Intel Corp. Core 2 Duo processor, 8G bytes of memory and 60G bytes of storage. In contrast, HP upgraded its previous blade PC -- the BladeSystem bc1500 -- by increasing the storage from 40G bytes to 80G bytes, the memory from 512M bytes to 1G byte, and the processor from an AMD Athlon 64 1500-series chip to Athlon 64 2100-series (for the bc2000) or dual-core Athlon 64 X2 (for the bc2500). The extra power meets user demands for a blade PC capable of running Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Vista Business edition and its fast graphics handling, Davis said. "Customers say 'If we're going to do thousands of units for a wholesale desktop replacement, we need this thing to support Vista, we need a graphics look and feel equivalent to a desktop PC, and we need a little more processing power than the bc1500, our previous generation,'" Davis said. The bc1500 ran Windows XP Professional. HP says that power allows the bc2000 to outperform other blade computing designs, since it accesses those new processors over a dedicated link instead of through a "time-share" network where multiple users tap into a single blade computer. "The IT department is being asked to do more than keep the trains running on time," Davis said. "They also have to help the end user comply with disaster continuity and recovery, handle outsourcing and offshore jobs, and maintain high security and compliance with the data." The bc2000 is shipping now, with the bc2500 to follow by late July. Pricing for the bc2500 has not yet been announced. Â
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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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SAN FRANCISCO--IBM will upgrade its Opteron-based e325 server for high-performance computing with Advanced Micro Devices&#39; dual-core chip in 2005, the company plans to announce Thursday.
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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 IS to share the designs of its blade servers in a bid to boost their popularity among developers. It follows moves to open up the companyâs microprocessor business and give partners more access to its
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All together now Fujitsu has kicked off a major effort to see its 10Gbps networking gear make its way into blade servers from the likes of HP, IBM, Dell and Sun Microsystems. More broadly, Fujitsu expects increased standardization in the blade market in the near future.â¦
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IBM is now offering enterprises the ability to add two small form-factor SCSI drives internally to the five new HS20 models of BladeCenter systems, which are based on the 2.8 GHz to 3.6 GHz Intel Xeon-processor with 64 bit extensions.
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In a long awaited move, Dell has finally re-entered the blade server market with the release of the Dell PowerEdge 1855 server system.
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IBM said it plans to build a blade server system for small to medium-sized businesses.
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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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IBM on Friday introduced an upgrade of its performance-monitoring software for web-based transactions, expanding its view of transaction flows by adding support for more infrastructure components.
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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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Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) has begun shipping a new product that the company thinks will give it an edge over rival IBM Corp. in the market for blade servers.
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IBM said Thursday that it plans to build a blade server system for small to medium-sized businesses (SMB). For IBM, that means customers with fewer than 1,000 employees.
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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.