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 2010
IBM
System x3550 M3
Product Overview
CONTENTS
Product Overview
1
Selling Features
2
Key Features
4
Key Options
13
x3550 M3 Images
14
x3550 M3 Specifications
15
The Bottom Line
18
Server Comparison
19
For More Information
20
Legal Information
20
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 lowering your overall risk. The
dual-
socket
IBM
®
System
x3550 M3
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 M3 offers you the trust that comes from the IBM global reach, service and
support.
The x3550 M3 is a game-changing rack server that uses significantly less power than previous
generations, with unified systems management tools, leadership reliability, availability, and
serviceability features and broad systems flexibility housed in a compact 1U mechanical package.
The x3550 M3 features
Intel
®
Xeon
®
5600
Series
6-core
and
4-core
, and
5500
Series
4-core
processors, with up to
12MB
of shared
L3 cache
, to provide you with the computing power you
need to match your business needs and growth. The new line of Intel processors delivers
unprecedented intelligent performance with features like adaptive performance for applications
and environments, Turbo Boost Technology and Hyper-Threading Technology, and integrated
power gates and automated power management.
The x3550 M3 supports up to
18 DIMMs
/
192GB
of
registered
(RDIMM)
1333MHz
DDR3
memory (or up to
12
DIMMs /
24GB
of unbuffered UDIMM memory) and provides
Chipkill
™
ECC
(Error Checking and Correcting) protection—for high performance and reliability. For even higher
levels of availability, the x3550 M3 also offers
memory mirroring
. Up to
4
integrated high-speed
Gigabit Ethernet
controllers are available (offering
TOE
(TCP Offload Engine) support on
Microsoft
®
Windows
®
), as are two high-performance adapter slots (
PCIe x16
). The x3650 M3
offers an optional
embedded hypervisor
to manage your virtual workloads.
The x3550 M3 offers a choice of up to supports up to
8
high-performance hot-swap HDDs with an
internal storage capacity of
4.0TB
(
2.5-inch hot-swap Serial-Attached SCSI
(SAS)
or
Serial-
Attached ATA (SATA)
drives). Alternatively, up to
8
solid-state drives (SSDs)
are also
available to keep power low, improve resiliency, and offer up to
400GB
of storage. The server
includes a choice of several IBM ServeRAID
®
storage controllers that 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
504
processor cores, offering tremendous deployment flexibility.
Standard in the x3550 M3 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 M3 comes with an
altitude sensor
(
altimeter
) that
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
fan modules
;
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 legacy
BIOS with a new generation
United Extensible Firmware Interface
(UEFI). UEFI provides a
more intuitive user interface and understandable event logs and better management.
