Big Blue Updates Entry xSeries Servers

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM has done a very good job at making very scalable and powerful X86 and X64 servers with its "Summit" and "Hurricane" chipsets, and has therefore been able to drive revenue and profits at the high end of its xSeries server line. But like other server makers with plenty of enterprise server expertise--that would be you, Hewlett Packard, and you, Sun Microsystems--IBM has not had an easy time competing with Dell in the entry server space in North America or Fujitsu-Siemens in Europe and Asia.

Big Blue, which has aspirations in the small and medium business space for its xSeries server line, has needed to get down and dirty in the entry Wintel server market and fight to get a bigger piece of the smaller action. By and large, small businesses want Windows and not Linux, and they don't want to spend a lot on a server, either. And increasingly, they want the kind of high-end features--remote systems management, service processors, 64-bit processing, lots of memory, and redundant power and cooling--that midrange servers of all stripes have.

To that end, IBM last week announced three new entry xSeries servers that the company believes will give it a better foot in the door at SMB shops. According to Stuart McRae, worldwide marketing manager for the xSeries line, SMB customers (as well as enterprise customers who buy lots of these cheap boxes for departmental servers, infrastructure racks, or parallel supercomputers) are adamant about getting better entry servers from any vendor. "For these customers, availability is more important than performance," he explains. "Nobody wants to put a lot of users on a machine that doesn't have great availability." What SMB shops also do not want is to buy the expensive two-socket tower and rack-mounted servers that have been the workhorses of the IT industry for the past couple of years. The advent of the dual-core processor is changing the market dynamics a bit, and McRae says that IBM can deliver a single-socket system with many of the availability features of those midrange two-socket boxes for anywhere from 30 percent to 40 percent less dough. And this is what the xSeries 100, xSeries 206m, and 306m are all about.

All three machines are based on Intel Corp's "Mukilteo" E7230 chipset, which supports only one processor socket per motherboard. The E7230 chipset can support the latest 64-bit, dual-core "Smithfield" Pentium D processor, the single-core Pentium 4, or the single-core Celeron processors (the latter two are now also 64-bit chips). While all three of the motherboards in the new machines are similar and are based on designs by IBM's Raleigh, North Carolina, and Taiwan xSeries labs, they are not identical. IBM doesn't make the boards, but instead contracts their manufacturing out to third parties. All of the machines come with a 90-day trial of Symantec's Norton Antivirus Enterprise Edition as well.

The xSeries 100 is a tower machine that comes with 256 MB of PC2-4200 DDR2 main memory standard, and with four DIMM slots is expandable to 8 GB using 2 GB DIMMs. This server has two PCI slots and two PCI-X slots and has room for two Serial ATA disk drives. Customers can choose 80 GB or 500 GB SATA disks. The box has a 310-watt power supply and a single Gigabit Ethernet port that is on the motherboard. Customers can get Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition or Enterprise Edition preconfigured on the xSeries 100 and can order Red Hat's Enterprise Linux 3 or 4 and Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 for the machines if they want; IBM does not pre-install Linux on its xSeries servers, but rather relies on customers to do it or the reseller partners who peddle a lot of IBM's entry server volumes. The base xSeries 100 comes with a 2.53 GHz Celeron chip, 256 GB of main memory, an 80 GB SATA disk, and no operating system; it costs $599.

The xSeries 206m is a kicker to an existing 5U tower server that did not support the Pentium D and did not have redundant, hot swap power supplies, either. The xSeries 206m supports the Pentium D at speeds up to 3 GHz, and Pentium 4 chips with either 1 MB or 2 MB of on-chip cache and running at up to 3.4 GHz. The Celeron chip is not supported in this box. The xSeries 206m has the same 8 GB main memory max using PC2-4200 DRR2 main memory as well as the same two PCI, two PCI-X peripheral slots. The xSeries 206m has room for four hot swap SATA or SCSI disk drives, with over 1 TB of internal capacity. It has a RAID mirroring controller built in, which can be upgraded to RAID 5 or RAID 6. This server comes with a 400-watt power supply standard, which can be upgraded to a pair of hot-swappable 430-watt power supplies. The xSeries 206m has an IMPI-compliant service processor built in as well, for remote management, and adds support for Novell Inc's NetWare 6.5 server operating system. A base xSeries 206m with a 3 GHz Pentium 4 processor, 256 MB of memory, no disks, and no operating system costs $679. With a 2.8 GHz Pentium D chip, 1 GB of memory, redundant power, no disks, and no operating system, the xSeries 206m costs $1,739.

The xSeries 306m is a 1U rack-mounted version of this server, and instead of being 25 to 27 inches deep, it is a shallower 22 inches deep, which allows more room for air to move around and for cables at the back of server racks. It has the same essential feeds and speeds as the xSeries 260m, except that it only supports two 500 GB SATA or two 600 GB SAS drives, has two Gigabit Ethernet ports on the main board, and has only two PCI-X or one PCI-Express and one PCI-X slot (depending on model number). It also has a more modest 350-watt power supply. The drives are hot swappable, but the power supply is not--and there is only room for one of them. With a 3 GHz Pentium 4 processor, 512 GB of memory, no disk, and no operating system, the xSeries 306m costs $1,089.