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Leadership enterprise server with significantly lower cost of ownership in a highly available and
expandable, rack-dense, 1U dual-socket server
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with a new generation United Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). UEFI provides a more
intuitive user interface and understandable event logs and better management.
With the inclusion of unique IBM service and support features such as the IMM, light path
diagnostics, IBM Systems Director 6.1, IBM Systems Director Active Energy Manager, IBM
ServerGuide
™
and
support for the optional Virtual Media Key for remote presence capability, the
x3550 M2 is designed for superior uptime.
If you need highly manageable, dual-socket/multi-core computing power in a rack-dense
package, the x3550 M2 is the ideal system.
Selling Features
Price/Performance
The x3550 M2 offers numerous features to boost performance and reduce costs:
• Up to two 4-core Xeon 5500 Series processors and 8MB or 4MB of shared cache per
processor, offer superior performance capable of tackling the toughest jobs. 64-bit
extensions provide the flexibility to run 32-bit and 64-bit applications concurrently. Xeon 5500
series processors offer up to 225% better performance than the previous-generation 5400
series processors and up to 900% better performance than the single-core processors of a
few years ago that you may still be using.
• Low-voltage processors draw less energy and produce less waste heat than high-voltage
processors, thus helping to reduce data center energy costs. Some 4-core Xeon 5500 Series
processors use only 60W. This is less than half the wattage consumed by older 130W
processors.
• Sixteen DIMMs of ultra-fast registered 1333MHz DDR3 ECC memory with Chipkill
1
error
protection (using x8 DIMMS) provides speed, high availability, and a memory capacity of up
128GB.
• Optional 32GB and 50GB solid-state drives (SSD) use only 2W of power per drive, vs. 9-
10W for 2.5-inch HDDs. This is as much as 80% less power than a 2.5-inch HDD would use
(with a corresponding reduction in heat output).
• The x3550 M2 is a leader in server resiliency. With hot-swap power supplies, fans, and
storage, the x3550 M2 has no single point of failure.
• The altimeter works in conjunction with IMM to govern fan rotation. which can help save
money at lower altitudes because the fans do not have to spin at high speed.
• Two high-speed PCIe x16 adapters (Gen 2) slots offer investment protection by supporting
high-performance adapters, such as 10Gb Ethernet, Fibre Channel and InfiniBand™ cards,
none of which will run in older 33MHz and 66MHz conventional PCI slots.
• Integrated ServeRAID-BR10i provides RAID-0/1/10 support without consuming a valuable
adapter slot. RAID-0/1/10 offers improved disk performance via data striping; RAID-1 offers
disk mirroring for high availability, and RAID-10 combines the benefits of speed and
availability. The x3550 M2 also supports full RAID-0/1/10/1E/5/6 using the optional
ServeRAID-MR10i card. It also offers higher performance, due to the 256MB battery-backed
onboard cache.
• Up to six 2.5-inch hot-swap SAS hard disk drives offer high-performance with high
availability. The SAS controller provides full-duplex (bi-directional 300MBps) data transfers
for SAS drives.
• The integrated dual Gigabit Ethernet controllers with IPMI 2.0 support provide high-speed
network communications. Jumbo Frames offer higher efficiency transfers for large data
packets. Two more NICS can be supported on the planar with an additional Dual Port GbE
daughter card.
• The TCP Offload Engine (TOE) feature offers higher performance for TCP/IP traffic, with less
overhead on the system processor.
• A high degree of device integration—including SAS/SATA or SSD, multiple ServeRAID
options, up to four Gigabit Ethernet ports, systems management and video controllers—
lowers costs and frees up valuable adapter slots.
Flexibility
The x3550 M2 has the ability to grow with your application requirements, thanks to
• A choice of quad-core or dual-core processors with 1.86 to 2.93GHz clock rates, up to 6.4
gigatransfers per second, Turbo Boost and Hyper-threading technology, and 60W to 95W
maximum power draw.
• Up to 128GB of high-speed fully-buffered DDR3 system memory.
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All models require Chipkill-enabled DIMMs (provided standard) for Chipkill protection.