Technology
Written by Alma Anonas-Carpio / Correspondent
Monday, 18 May 2009 20:25

Computermaker IBM recently unveiled its newest server offerings for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Makati City. These new System x servers are the first such machines to carry the 45-nanometer Intel Xeon 5500 processors in the Philippines, product marketing manager for IBM’s growth market unit Andrew Spurgeon said.

According to Spurgeon, these new products offer hardware-software combinations that will enable customers to easily roll out virtualized computing and significantly reduce their operating costs through “higher performance, simplified management and increased [server] utilization.

Using IBM’s dynamic infrastructure framework, the Xeon-based servers will be “less expensive and easier to manage because they are designed to lower ownership costs,” Spurgeon said. “This is a significant announcement because we are using the same [size chassis and blade servers] as the previous generation of System x machines, so the new servers will fit into the same CPU [chassis] size, reducing upgrade costs.”

According to him, the new servers are “no-compromise” blade servers that contain “two hot-swappable drives of clients’ choice of Sata or solid-state disks.

They also come at half the cost, less than half the power demand and take up half the space of the previous generation of servers.

He also presented independent studies that indicate that, thanks to the smaller and cooler Xeon 5500 chipset and the well-laid-out design of the new System x blade server, clients can expect power savings of up to 93 percent “if you factor in electricity costs for cooling and running these machines.”

He also said IBM “is the first [company] to announce the availability of a unified extensible firmware interface [UEFI] to replace the old BIOS-based software.”

BIOS stands for basic input-output system, the boot firmware designed to be the first code run by any computer when the machine is turned on.

The first priority of the BIOS is to identify, test and initialize system devices like the video display card, hard drive and other hardware. UEFI is a new base software framework that is hardware-agnostic and it offers faster boot-up times and more reliable operational framework for computers.

The new System x blades also come with a “calibrated vector cooling system” that IBM developed “in partnership with Intel” to make cooling more efficient for the new servers. According to Spurgeon, this new cooling technology ensures that “less power needs to be spent keeping the server cool, so clients can reduce their carbon footprints and reduce operating costs without sacrificing quality computing.”

According to IBM system architect Joseph Garcia, the new System x servers may target SMEs, but are efficient enough to “cover all markets for the SME market all the way up to the enterprise level and, even, telecommunications companies because all these businesses need the same processes, power and speed. The differences will be in the chassis, which are also scalable and can be customized for SMEs, enterprise-level businesses and telcos because we have a wide range of options for our clients.”

* Published in BusinessMirror