AMD Opteron for IBM Server

At a company event in New York on Tuesday, AMD together with IBM unveiled the new System x3455, x3655 and x3755 rack-mount servers and the two-way Bladecenter LS21 and four-way LS41 blade servers. According to IBM the new servers powered by Opterons will be available in the next 3 months, but their price will not be specified until the new "Rev F" Opteron is on the market. The “Rev F” Opteron is expected to be shown at LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in San Francisco, on August 15, and it will give IBM an advantage compared to SunFire server line from Sun Microsystems, which uses the “Rev E” chips, according to IBM.

The Opteron is showing strong performance in its overall power consumption and heat production, an increasingly important metric given the rising fuel costs and current data centre consolidation trend. The new family uses a collection of hardware and software technologies called Cool Blue, capable of running the servers with 40% better performance per watt than competing blade chassis. The system reduces server heat emissions by chilling discharged air with a water-cooled door that covers the back of each rack. The technology will be bundled free of charge with all BladeCenter and System x servers. It allows IT departments to monitor actual power usage and heat emissions and limit the amount of power used by a single server.

The new server line from IBM and AMD is targeted at the business sector, which has an increasing hunger for high computing capabilities for general business needs, such as business intelligence, enterprise resource planning and more. The business performance computing is a new compute model that leverages high performance computing capability to more effectively meet such needs.