High-end workloads drive ever-increasing and ever-changing constraints. In addition to requiring greater memory capacity, these workloads challenge you to do more with less and to find new ways to simplify deployment and ownership. And although higher system availability and comprehensive systems management have always been critical, they have become even more important in recent years.
Difficult challenges, such as these, create new opportunities for innovation. IBM® eX5 portfolio delivers this innovation. This portfolio of high-end computing introduces the fifth generation of IBM X-Architecture® technology. It is the culmination of more than a decade of x86 innovation and firsts that have changed the expectations of the industry. With this latest generation, eX5 is again leading the way as the shift toward virtualization, platform management, and energy efficiency accelerates. This IBM Redpaper™ publication introduces the new IBM eX5 portfolio and describes the technical detail behind each server.
A PDF file of the Performance Tuning and Scaling Guide for IBM Systems Director 6.2and an HTML file that will link you to a sizing plug-in for the IBM Systems Workload Estimatorhas been made available on the IBM Support pages.
The purpose of this paper is to introduce and describe key features of the IBM® System x® Server Firmware. The following IBM System x and BladeCenter® servers are the IBM x86 servers that include native UEFI support (as well as BIOS compatibility), as of the date of this document:
IBM iDataPlex™ dx360 M2
IBM BladeCenter HS22/HS22v
IBM System x3200/3250 M3
IBM System x3400/3500 M2-M3
IBM System x3550/3650 M2-M3
IBM System x3850 X5
IBM System x Server Firmware replaces the BIOS of previous-generation servers while maintaining full backward compatibility.
IBM® Systems Director 6.2 is a platform-management foundation that streamlines the way you manage physical and virtual systems across a heterogeneous environment. By using industry standards, IBM Systems Director supports multiple operating systems and virtualization technologies across IBM and non-IBM x86 platforms.
Through a single user interface, IBM Systems Director provides consistent views for viewing managed systems, determining how these systems relate to one another, and identifying their statuses, thus helping to correlate technical resources with business needs. A set of common tasks included with IBM Systems Director provides many of the core capabilities required for basic management, which means instant out-of-the-box business value. These common tasks include discovery, inventory, configuration, system health, monitoring, updates, event notification and automation across managed systems.
This document provides information on how to install and set up IBM Systems Director in a Windows environment. It shows how to use the install script, and also offers an example of a manual installation. There are step-by-step instructions with screen captures showing how to install IBM Systems Director 6.1.0 and how to update to the latest version.
VMware published the first results of hardware using the Intel 7500 processor.
With a score of 71.85 @ 49 tiles using VMmark v1.1.1 on a x3850 X5 with 4 sockets 32 total cores and 64 total threads this system way outperforms all other systems.
Pre-Sales Advisor is an enablement tool created for IBM Business Partners. Pre-Sales Advisor will help you produce quotations for a range of Servers, Storage and BladeCenters to send to your customers and your IBM Distributor.
Using Pre-Sales Advisor, you will be able to check the availability of stock and pricing in the Distribution Channel of the products you need.
Beginning this month new IBM servers have announced and they will feature Integrated Emulex 10GbE technology! This technology will be integrated into models of eight enterprise-class and high-volume IBM server platforms, including the System x3650 M3, x3550 M3 and two IBM BladeCenter server platforms—including the HS22 and HS22V—as well as four new X5 systems.
The announced Emulex Integrated Virtual Fabric Adapters for IBM System x and IBM BladeCenter servers have a 2-port 10GB ethernet and comes in three formats:
How to configure Virtual NICs using the Emulex Virtual Fabric Adapter and BNT Virtual Fabric Switch Module
This tutorial is intended as a ‘how-to’ guide for configuring BladeCenter Virtual NIC (vNIC) operation using the Emulex Virtual Fabric Adapter (VFA) and the Blade Network Technologies (BNT) Virtual Fabric Switch Module (VFS).
For the initial release of vNIC functionality for BladeCenter, configuration is ac-complished using the standard management interfaces of the VFS. This guide describes implementation examples for both the Command Line Interface (CLI) and the Browser-Based Interface (BBI).
The redpaper "Implementing Microsoft Hyper-V on IBM System x and IBM BladeCenter" is available @ redbooks.ibm.com.
Microsoft® Hyper-V™ is the next-generation server virtualization technology. This technology is available either as a feature of Windows® Server 2008 or as a separate free download in the form of the Hyper-V Server.
In this IBM® Redpapers™ publication, IBM introduces Hyper-V and describe its features. IBM explains how to install and use the product to create virtual machines and introduces the tools that you can use to manage the virtual machines that run on Hyper-V. In addition, IBM introduces high availability features such as clustering and migration.
The paper is suitable for IT specialists who want to learn what Hyper-V offers and how to install, configure, and manage the product.
A Windows and Linux package has been published on the IBM Support website which contains the installers for the Cisco 10G Switch Plug-in for the IBM Systems Director application. These installers will install the needed software to allow the IBM Systems Director to configure and monitor Cisco 10G switches. All BladeCenter chassis are supported.
Networkworld published their finding on several products they tested and said:
"Two eight-core Intel 5570 Nehalem processors, two 10Gigabit Ethernet NICs, 50GB SSD drives, 150GB 15k hard drives and 48GB of RAM. Not to mention energy efficiency and strong management features. And all for around $10,000. What's not to like?
In our tests, the Nehalem-based blade delivered a 10x increase in performance when compared to Intel's Core-based Xeon processor. In terms of total overall power consumption, the Nehalem processors consumed 17% more power than the Xeon-based system, which is a pretty good bargain when you're gaining a 10x boost in performance.
Bottom line: The combination of Nehalem processors, 10G Ethernet, and lots of RAM make the HS22 a great choice for data center virtualization."
Video #1 in series...What is 5? Five minute mile? And what does this have to do with IBM System x Servers? IBM and System x team is having too much fun. Join us!
Adobe Flash Player not installed or older than 9.0.115!
Adobe Flash Player not installed or older than 9.0.115!
Adobe Flash Player not installed or older than 9.0.115!
Adobe Flash Player not installed or older than 9.0.115!
High-end workloads drive ever-increasing and ever-changing constraints. In addition to requiring greater memory capacity, these workloads challenge you to do more with less and to find new ways to simplify deployment and ownership. And although higher system availability and comprehensive systems management have always been critical, they have become even more important in recent years.
A PDF file of the 
How to configure Virtual NICs using the Emulex Virtual Fabric Adapter and BNT Virtual Fabric Switch Module
News