Intel has announced a new generation of two socket Xeon 5500 ‘Nehalem’ server processors , which in turn has inspired server manufacturers to announce all new products based on the new technology. Over 20 new servers were added to Competitive Profiles CPSystems within 24 hours of the announcement this week, including new rack, blade and tower servers from Dell and HP new rack and blade servers from IBM and tower and rack servers from Fujitsu.
Introducing this new processor has not been a simple matter of releasing a new chip to plug into existing servers. Intel has ushered in an entirely new system platform including the new interconnect, chipset and memory technology. Therefore to accommodate the new processors server manufacturers have had to introduce completely new models in order to take advantage of the features available.
In IDEAS opinion, Intel’s new ‘Nehalem’ Xeon 5500 processor presents a great opportunity for IT purchasers to save money through server consolidation and improved power management. A review by IDEAS of the 20 new servers from Dell, HP and IBM, IDEAS found that the systems offer two to three times the amount of memory as previous generation servers, while also offering increased system performance (as much as double the previous generation), reduced memory latency and better idle power management.
An economic downturn might not seem like the best time to invest in new IT infrastructure, but for many users, this could be a crucial time to reduce their net Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) while still meeting their server workload requirements.
A summary of some of the major new products, as they appear in our Competitive Profiles service, appears below.
Dell
- PowerEdge T610 – a tower server
- PowerEdge R610 – a 1U rackmount server
- PowerEdge R710 – a 2U rackmount server
- PowerEdge M610 – a half height blade server
- PowerEdge M710 – a full height blade server
Fujitsu
- PRIMERGY TX300 S5 – a tower server
- PRIMERGY RX200 S5 – a 1U rackmount server
- PRIMERGY RX300 S5 – a 2U rackmount server
HP
- ProLiant ML150 G6 – a tower server
- ProLiant ML350 G6 – a tower server
- ProLiant ML370 G6 – a tower server
- ProLiant DL160 G6 – a 1U rackmount server
- ProLiant DL180 G6 – a 2U rackmount server
- ProLiant DL360 G6 – a 1U rackmount server
- ProLiant DL370 G6 – a 4U rackmount server
- ProLiant DL380 G6 – a 2U rackmount server
- ProLiant BL280c G6 – a half height blade server (available April 27)
- ProLiant BL460c G6 – a half height blade server
- ProLiant BL490c G6 – a half height blade server
IBM
- System x3550 M2 – a 1U rackmount server
- System x3650 M2 – a 2U rackmount server (available April 30)
- BladeCenter HS22 – a single width blade server
- iDataPlex dx360 M2 – iDataPlex node
All the above systems with the exception of the two with late April availability dates are available to order now.
Further announcements are expected, including new models from Sun and most probably Cisco’s new Unified Computing System. These will be included in the Competitive Profiles CPSystems coverage as they are announced in the coming weeks.
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