IBM 250000 - Manual

Leadership enterprise server with significantly lower cost of ownership in a highly available and
expandable, rack-dense, 1U dual-socket server

Please see the Legal Information section for important notices and information.

1

Product Guide

March 2009

IBM

System x3550 M2

Product Overview

CONTENTS

Product Overview

1

Selling Features

2

Key Features

4

Key Options

12

x3550 M2 Images

14

x3550 M2 Specifications

15

The Bottom Line

17

Server Comparison

18

For More Information

19

Legal Information

19

Outstanding innovation in only 1U

Suggested Uses:

All sectors requiring highly available, energy-efficient, rack-optimized solution

for physical and virtual intensive commercial environments like eBusiness/eCommerce,
collaboration, virtualization, database, and enterprise resource planning applications.

Your challenge is to do more with less—serve more Web pages, handle more secure
connections, support more e-mail users. You need to reduce the costs of doing business and
improve the service you deliver to your customers while lower your overall risk. The

dual-socket

IBM

®

System

x3550 M2

can reduce your costs with its new energy smart design. It can improve

service with reduced operational complexity and increased management functionality. It will lower
your IT risk with the resiliency that comes from no single point of failure. And like all IBM servers,
the x3550 M2 offers you the trust that comes from the IBM global reach, service and support.

The x3550 M2 is not simply an upgrade to a previous server. It is one of our new generation of
X-Architecture servers. It is a game-changing, completely redesigned rack server using
significantly less power with unified systems management tools, leadership reliability, availability,
serviceability features and broad systems flexibitliyt housed in a compact 1U mechanical
package.

The x3550 M2 features

Intel

®

Xeon

®

5500 Series Processors

and either

8MB

or

4MB

of shared

cache

, to help provide you with the computing power you need to match your business needs

and growth. This new line of Intel processors delivers unprecedented intelligent performance with
features like adaptive performance for applications and environments, turbo boost and hyper-
threading technology, and integrated power gates and automated power management.

The x3550M2 uses up to

16 DIMMs

with

128GB

of

registered

1333MHz

DDR3

memory with

Chipkill

™

ECC

(Error Checking and Correcting) protection—for high performance and reliability.

For even higher levels of availability, the x3550M2 also offers online memory mirroring.

Up to 4

integrated high-speed

Gigabit Ethernet

controllers with

TOE

(TCP Offload Engine) and

Jumbo

Frame

support are available, as are two high-performance adapter slots (

PCIe x16

). The

x3550M2 offers an optional

embedded hypervisor

to manage your virtual workloads.

The x3550 M2 offers a choice of up to six high-performance hot-swap hard disk drives with an
internal storage capacity of 1.8TB (

six 2.5-inch hot-swap Serial-Attached SCSI

(SAS) or

SATA

HDDs) Optional solid-state drives are also available to keep power low and improve resiliency and
offer up to 300

GB

of storage.

The server supports a choice of four IBM ServeRAID

®

storage

controllers which provide broad levels of

hardware

-based

RAID solutions

. The ultradense

1U

form factor allows businesses to increase their computing power and spread their workload
without outgrowing their current data center. Up to

42

of these

1U

servers can be installed in a

single 42U rack, for a total of up to

84

processors and

336

processor cores, offering tremendous

deployment flexibility. Optional Advanced Connectivity Technology (

ACT)

interconnect cabling

reduces cable clutter and cost and minimizes installation time when interconnecting many rack-
mounted servers.

Standard in the x3550 M2 is the Integrated Management Module (IMM) that enables the user to
manage and control the server easily—both locally and remotely. In conjunction with the IMM, the
x3550 M2 comes with an

altitude sensor (altimeter)

, which

governs fan rotation

based on

altitude to help lower your energy consumption. The IMM offers a high level of manageability that
is designed to keep costs down and the system up—even when network usage increases. IBM’s
innovative pop-out/drop-down

light path diagnostics

panel enables quick servicing of the

system if a problem develops. These advanced features help maximize network availability by
increasing uptime, as do hot

simple-swap solid-state drives

;

hot-swap/redundant SAS

or

SATA

HDDs

, redundant ultra-efficient

power supplies

and

fans

;

Active Memory

™

; integrated

RAID

;

temperature-controlled fans

with

Calibrated Vectored Cooling

™

;

IPMI 2.0

support,

including

highly secure remote power control

and

Serial over LAN

; as well as

text-console

redirect over LAN

.

Another improvement with the new generation of X-Architecture is the replacement of old BIOS