A highly available and expandable, rack-dense, 1U dual-socket SMP server, for application
serving in Web environments
Please see the Legal Information section for important notices and information.
2
superior performance capable of tackling the toughest jobs.
64-bit extensions
provide the
flexibility to run 32-bit and 64-bit applications concurrently.
•
Low-voltage processors
draw less energy and produce less waste heat than high-voltage
processors, thus helping to reduce data center energy costs. Some
dual-core
Xeon
processors use only
65W
. This is half the wattage consumed by older 130W processors. The
50W
and
80W
quad-core
processors are even more economical, consuming only
12.5W
and
20W
(respectively) per core, vs. 32.5W per core for the 65W dual-core processors.
•
Ultra-fast
fully buffered
667MHz PC2-5300 DDR II
ECC memory with
Chipkill
1
protection
provides speed and high availability.
•
Two
high-speed PCI-E adapter slots
offer investment protection by supporting high-
performance adapters, such as 10Gb Ethernet, Fibre Channel and InfiniBand cards, none of
which will run in older 33MHz and 66MHz conventional PCI slots.
•
Integrated
ServeRAID-8k-l
provides
RAID-0
/
1/10
support at no extra charge and without
consuming a valuable adapter slot. RAID-0 offers improved disk performance via data striping;
RAID-1 offers disk mirroring for high availability, and RAID-10 combines the benefits of speed
and availability. The x3550 is upgradeable to full
RAID-0/1/10/1E/5/6
support, using the
optional ServeRAID-8k card. It also offers higher performance, due to the
256MB battery-
backed onboard cache
.
•
Up to
two 3.5-inch
or
four 2.5-inch
(depending on the model)
hot-swap SAS
hard disk
drives offer high-performance with high availability. The SAS controller provides full-duplex (
2
x 300MBps
) data transfers for SAS drives. For lower cost and high capacity, other models
support up to
two
simple-swap Serial ATA
drives. The SATA II drives offer performance
nearly equal to that of Ultra320 SCSI (
300MBps
half-duplex vs. 320MBps half-duplex,
respectively). Alternatively,
2.5-inch
drives consume approximately
half the power
of 3.5-inch
drives.
•
The integrated
dual Gigabit Ethernet
controllers with
IPMI 2.0
support provide high-speed
network communications.
Jumbo Frames
offer higher efficiency transfers for large data
packets.
•
The TCP Offload Engine (
TOE
) feature offers higher performance for TCP/IP traffic, with less
overhead on the system processor.
•
A
high degree of device integration
—including SAS or SATA, RAID, dual Gigabit Ethernet,
systems management and video controllers—lowers costs and frees up valuable adapter
slots.
Flexibility
The x3550 has the ability to grow with your application requirements, thanks to
•
A choice of
quad-core
or
dual-core
processors with
1.6
to
3.16GHz
clock rates,
1333MHz
or
1066MHz
FSB, and
50W
to
120W
maximum power draw.
•
Up to
32GB
of high-speed fully-buffered DDR2 system memory.
•
Two
available
high-performance
PCI-E
adapter slots in all models. Optionally, if desired, the
riser card containing one of the PCI-E slots can be exchanged for a riser containing a
PCI-
X/133
adapter slot.
•
Installing the slotless
ServeRAID-8k
option upgrades the integrated
ServeRAID-8k-l
controller with
256MB
of low-cost, battery-backed cache to enable even higher-performance
hardware RAID support, and allows the x3550 to offer
six
RAID levels:
RAID-0, 1, 10, 1E, 5
and
6
. The optional
MegaRAID 8480
controller supports up to
four
IBM System Storage
™
EXP3000
expansion units containing up to
48
SAS HDDs and
14.4TB
of external storage.
•
The
six USB 2.0
ports are up to
40X
faster
2
than older
USB 1.1
ports. This provides speedy
access to external HDDs (non-arrayed), optical drives, tape drives, and other USB devices.
Two ports are on the front of the unit and four are on the back.
•
A choice of up to
two
internal
3.5-inch hot-swap SAS
or
simple-swap SATA II
HDDs or
four
2.5-inch hot-swap SAS HDDs
(depending on the model) offer a variety of
storage options.
The 3.5-inch SAS models provide a maximum of
600GB
of internal
hot-swap
storage. The
2.5-inch SAS models support up to
587.2GB
of
hot-swap SAS
storage. The 3.5-inch SATA
models provide a maximum of
2TB
of internal
simple-swap
storage.
•
Alternatively, iSCSI or Fibre Channel-attached storage can be attached using IBM
System
Storage
or
TotalStorage
®
servers.
1
All models require Chipkill-enabled DIMMs (provided standard) for Chipkill protection.
2
Data transfer rates may be less than the maximum possible.
