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.
3
enable higher-performance hardware RAID support, and allows the x3550 M3 to offer
five
RAID levels standard:
RAID-0/1/10/5
/
50
(and optionally
6/60
with
SED)
.
•
The
five USB 2.0
ports (two front, two rear, one internal) 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 two are on the back.
The internal port supports a flash drive with embedded hypervisor.
•
A choice of up to
eight
2.5-inch hot-swap SAS/SATA
HDDs
or
solid-state drives
, or
four
2.5-inch drives and
one
internal optical drive, offer a variety of
storage options. The SAS and
SATA HDD models provide a maximum of
8.0TB
of internal
hot-swap
storage. The x3550 M3
supports a mix of hot-swap SAS, SATA and SSD drives.
•
Alternatively, direct-attach, network-attached storage (NAS), or iSCSI or Fibre Channel-
attached storage can be attached using IBM
System Storage™
servers.
Manageability / Security
Powerful systems management features simplify local and remote management of the x3550 M3:
•
The x3550 M3 includes an
Integrated
Management Module (IMM)
to monitor server
availability, perform Predictive Failure Analysis, etc., and trigger IBM
Systems Director
alerts.
The IMM performs the functions of both the Baseboard Management Controller (
BMC
) of
earlier systems and the
Remote Supervisor Adapter II
and is upgradeable to
remote
presence/cKVM.
•
An optional Virtual Media Key provides additional systems management capabilities, including
Web-based out-of-band control; virtual floppy and optical drive support; Windows “blue
screen” error capture; LDAP and SSL support; and remote redirection of PCI video, text,
keyboard and mouse (cKVM). And it does all this without consuming a valuable adapter slot.
•
Integrated industry-standard Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (
UEFI
) next-generation
BIOS. New capabilities include:
– Human readable event logs – no more beep codes
– Complete setup solution by allowing adapter configuration function to be moved into UEFI
– Complete out-of-band coverage by Advance Settings Utility to simplify remote setup
•
Integrated
Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 1.2
support.
•
Intel
Trusted Execution Technology
(TXT) support for more secure processing, and
industry-standard
AES NI
support for faster, stronger encryption (in 5600 Series processors
only).
•
Integrated
IPMI 2.0
support alerts IBM Systems Director to anomalous environmental factors,
such as voltage and thermal conditions. It also supports
highly secure remote power
control
using data encryption.
•
Text Console Redirection
support allows the administrator to remotely view x3550 M3 text
messages over Serial or LAN.
•
IBM
Systems
Director 6.1x
is included for proactive systems management. IBM Systems
Director comes with a portfolio of tools, including
IBM Systems Director Active Energy
Manager
™
,
Service and Support Manager
, and others. In addition, IBM Systems Director
offers extended systems management tools for additional server management and increased
availability. When a problem is encountered, IBM Systems Director can issue administrator
alerts via e-mail, pager, and other methods.
•
IBM
Systems Director Active Energy Manager
™, an IBM-exclusive, is designed to take
advantage of new system power management features, by providing actual realtime energy
monitoring and reporting features.
Availability and Serviceability
The x3550 M3 provides many features to simplify serviceability and increase system uptime:
•
x3550 M3 servers offer
Chipkill
ECC memory protection
3
(when using x4 DIMMs). Chipkill
memory is up to
16X
better than standard ECC memory at correcting memory errors. This can
help reduce downtime caused by memory errors.
•
The x3550 M3 offers selectable
memory mirroring
for redundancy in the event of a non-
correctable memory failure
•
Toolless
cover removal
provides easy access to upgrades and serviceable parts. Similarly,
the Virtual Media Key and the
ServeRAID
controller can be installed and replaced without
tools. This means less time (and therefore less money) spent servicing the x3550 M3.
2
Data transfer rates may be less than the maximum possible.
3
Chipkill protection is supported with x4 DDR3 DIMMs, but not x8 DIMMs.
