IBM has never admitted that it has been trying to sell its System x and BladeCenter server business to Chinese PC and system maker Lenovo, which also took its venerable and usually unprofitable PC business over at the end of 2004. But in a conference call with Wall Street analysts going over Big Blue's second quarter financial …

Even before IBM launched its Power7+ entry and midrange servers in early February, El Reg told you that it was suspicious, although not yet alarming, that no rumors were going around that Big Blue was working on Power7+ kickers to its PS7XX series of blade servers for its BladeCenter enclosures. Well, it looks like the Power …

Egenera, the virtualized server infrastructure pioneer, has certified its PAN Manager control freakery to run on IBM's BladeCenter blade servers. With the certification on Big Blue's blades, Egenera now supports the major suppliers of X86-based blade servers – that's Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Dell – as well as Fujitsu – which …

IBM announced a passel of shiny new x86 iron this week, all built around Intel's two-socket Xeon E5-2600 chip, which formally debuted on Tuesday – although select customers such as Big Blue have been fiddling with that server chip for months. IBM generates a lot of its revenues and profits in hardware and software from …

IBM is rejiggering its hybrid mainframe-blade "system of systems" that was announced last July and that began shipping in the fall. Big Blue is also providing details of the hypervisors, networks, and operating systems that will be supported on the hybrid configuration, which marries a System zEnterprise 196 mainframe with …

SC10If you want to sell supercomputers these days, you need to have a GPU story to tell. And Big Blue has been telling a story about a blade server for GPUs for the past several months, but unfortunately it doesn't actually have the product ready. However, in about a month this BladeCenter GPU expansion blade is coming to market, …

Today is IBM's big storage announcement day, as we report elsewhere, but the company also tweaked a bunch of servers and associated switching options. The System x3250 M3 rack machine that is enhanced today, as well as the iDataPlex dx360 M3 rack-blade hybrid machine, were both announced back in the spring. But today they get …

GTC Video BlogIBM made big news on the first day of last week's GPU Technology Conference by announcing that it'll roll out an Nvidia Fermi–based expansion blade. While it's not formally announced yet (the plan is to do so in Q4), IBM had one at the show and walked me through it for the video below. It isn't a standalone server; it's a …

Sam Palmisano got out the Big Blue check book once again this morning and wrote out what was reportedly a $400m check to the owners of privately held Blade Network Technologies. For a company whose chief executive officer and chairman has slammed rival Hewlett-Packard over its inability to invest in its own innovation, IBM is …

It may be hard to imagine why, but some customers who buy blade servers don't want the fastest x64 processors they can get their hands on. They may not be virtualizing the blades, and they may only be running simple print, file, and Web infrastructure workloads. Therefore don't need lots of memory or even two processor sockets. …

With so much of its money and profits coming from big Power and mainframe servers, you can bet that IBM is not exactly enthusiastic about the advent of the eight-core "Nehalem-EX" Xeon 7500 processors from Intel and their ability to link up to eight sockets together in a single system image. But IBM can't let other server makers …

IBM has launched a new Xeon-based blade server for BladeCenter boxes that it says is tuned specifically to support virtualization hypervisors that in turn run virtual Linux or Windows instances. What IBM means mostly is that the box has gobs of memory and fast and small flash drives for storage. The single-wide, full-height …

It was only a few months ago that Dell gave Cisco a powerful smack to the face by publicly denouncing the network giants' big Unified Computing System pitch as a vendor lock-in scheme when unveiling a set of servers, storage systems, and third-party network technologies it called an "open" alternative.* Well, Cisco remembers. …

As networking giant and server wannabe Cisco Systems last month hinted it would do, the company has launched a variant of its Nexus switch that can be tucked up inside of another server maker's blade servers. In this case, IBM has kissed and made up (sort of) with Cisco and is the first customer for the Nexus 4000 switch, which …

IBM has certified VMware's ESX Server 4.0 hypervisor and its vSphere 4.0 virtualization management stack on its System x rack and tower servers and on its BladeCenter blade servers. And the company is now shipping the vSphere stack on its x64 boxes. Having no hypervisor of its own for x64-based servers, IBM is free to endorse …

While the six-core "Istanbul" Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices were launched yesterday, not every vendor is ready on day one to get the chip into existing or new products. This seems to be the case with IBM today as it tweaks its BladeCenter boxes that support Intel's quad-core "Nehalem EP" Xeon 5500s, which were …

Blade Network Technologies, the private equity-backed blade networking spinout from now-bankrupt Nortel, has rebranded its blade switches, dumping the old Nortel moniker. And to battle Cisco Systems, coming into the blade server space with its California blade servers featuring integrated and virtualized switching, BNT has …

Nehalem DayIBM is looking for the new Nehalem EP-based servers to kick start its System x rack server and BladeCenter blade server business, which saw a steepening decline in sales as 2008 wound down. Big Blue will today announce two new rack servers, a blade server, and some configurable compute and storage nodes for its avant garde …