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IBM slots 'Lynnfield' Xeons into System x

Aiming low at SMBs

October debut

One set of systems comes with one of the four Xeon 3400 processors and a SATA or SAS disk controller on the motherboard. The machine has room for two 3.5-inch drives or four 2.5-inch drives, and the integrated disk controller on the system board supports striping or mirroring. If you want RAID 0/1 data protection, there is a PCI-Express x4 card dedicated for this. The server has two Gigabit Ethernet ports, and for peripherals, it sports two PCI-Express 2.0 x8 slots and two x8 slots running at the older PCI-Express 1.0 speed (one is eaten by the RAID controller). It can also be rigged with optional an PCI-X slot. The System x3250 M3 comes with a 351-watt power supply.

The System x3250 M3 will be available on October 30, but IBM started talking orders for it today. Pricing was not available at press time and the machine can not yet be ordered through Big Blue's online store. IBM is supporting Microsoft Windows Server 2008, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on this box.

If tower servers are your thing - and they certainly are for lots of small businesses - then IBM wants to sell you the System x3200 M3, which is essentially the same machine in a tower case with some tweaks. This machine has the same memory and processor options, and it sports two PCI slots, two PCI-Express x8 slots, and two PCI-Express x4 slots (again, one is eaten by the base RAID controller).

The tower comes with seven drive bays standard, with four of those being for 3.5-inch disks and an optional eight-drive cage for 2.5-inch drives coming in January 2010. The machine has a 401-watt power supply, and it supports Windows 2008, RHEL, and SLES, just like the rack box. It will be available on October 30 as well, but you can order it today.

Without knowing the pricing, it is hard to know if what IBM has put together is worth buying or whether thus will give it a chance to recover its x64 server biz.

IBM may eventually get around to delivering the Xeon 3400 processors in a blade form factor, but it did not do so today. IBM does already sell the HS12 blade, which is a single socket box that supports older single-, dual-, and quad-core Xeon processors as well as Core 2 Duos.

In addition to the two new servers, IBM also debuted the ServeRAID-BR10iL SAS and SATA disk controller for its System x server lineup. This is the four-port RAID 0/1 controller that plugs into the x8 slot using an x4 connector mentioned above. It also can be used in the System x3400 M2, and is supported by Windows, RHEL 4 and 5, SLES 10 and 11, and VMware's ESX Server 3.5 and 4.0 hypervisors.

Finally, IBM said today that it was ready to preload Microsoft's Windows Small Business Server 2008 Standard Edition and Premium Edition onto its System x and BladeCenter x64-based machines. SBS 2008 Standard Edition comes with a basic Windows Server 2008 setup, plus Exchange Server 2007 Standard Edition, SharePoint Services 3.0, and Update Services 3.0.

SBS Premium Edition puts Standard Edition on one server and then puts SBS and SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition on a second server that is intended to be an application platform instead of an infrastructure platform. IBM will begin shipping Windows SBS 2008 on System x and BladeCenter machines starting October 2. This, again, is aimed specifically at small and medium businesses with relatively modest computing requirements. ®

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