4
IBM System x3950 M2 and x3850 M2 Technical Introduction
Three servers: A three-node complex comprised of three x3950 M2 servers, with six or 12
processors and up to 768 GB RAM installed
Four servers: A four-node complex comprised of four x3950 M2 servers, with eight or 16
processors and up to 1 TB RAM installed
The following are the key features of the x3850 M2 and x3950 M2:
Four-way
1
-capable server.
eX4 Architecture featuring the XA-64e fourth-generation chipset.
Two standard Intel Xeon® MP dual-core or quad-core processors, upgradable to
four-way. These processors support 64-bit addressing with the Intel 64 Technology
architecture.
Support for Intel Virtualization Technology (VT).
Support for an internal removable flash drive installed in a dedicated USB connector on
the system board.
4 GB or 8 GB memory standard expandable to 256 GB (using 8 GB DIMMs), using
high-performance PC2-5300 ECC DDR2 DIMMs.
Active Memory™ with Memory ProteXion, memory mirroring, memory hot-swap and
hot-add, and ChipKill.
Seven half-length 64-bit PCI Express x8 slots, two of which are hot-swap.
Integrated LSI 1078 serial-attached SCSI (SAS) controller.
Supports the RAID-0 and the RAID-1 standards. To enable additional RAID features and a
256 MB battery-backed cache, an optional ServeRAID-MR10k RAID controller is
available.
Four internal hot-swap drive bays for up to 584 GB of internal storage (using 146 GB
disks).
Integrated Dual-port Broadcom 5709C PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller.
Onboard Baseboard Management Controller and Remote Supervisor Adapter II adapter
are both standard.
Three-year warranty onsite, nine hours per day, five days per week, with a next business
day response.
The x3850 M2 and x3950 M2 are optimized for ERP, high-end database, and server
consolidation applications.
Comparing the x3850 M2 with the x3850
Table 1 on page 5 shows the major differences between the x3850 and the x3850 M2.
Note:
Support for three-node and four-node configurations is planned for 2Q08.
1
4-way means 4 processor sockets. In this document, we use
way
to indicate a processor socket regardless of
whether it is a dual-core processor or a quad-core processor.
