IBM servers go green

By Christelle du Toit for IBM
Johannesburg, 05 Sep 2007

Environmental awareness is one of the primary drivers behind IBM's two new server products announced today.

The computing giant has released the next generation of its chipset technology, X4, as well as a blade server aimed specifically at small and medium enterprises (SMEs), the BladeCenterS.

Both products cater for the trend towards virtualisation, which international IBM spokesman Tikiri Wanduragala says forms part of the "green theme" dominating business at the moment.

"The hot topic for big corporates is power consumption," says Wanduragala. "The only way to achieve real energy efficiency is to have fewer servers. Power issues are the principal drivers for hardware at the moment."

IBM's new X4 contains embedded hypervisor capacity, which will allow users to deploy virtualised server applications "out of the box".

The "brick", which makes up the system, has 16 sockets, each taking four cores, so the technology allows for the capacity of 64 machines. According to Wanduragala, the X4's power consumption per image "is the lowest in the industry".

X4 will start shipping in volume in the fourth quarter of 2007, with the building-block steps being announced in first quarter of 2008.

The new BladeCenterS is a six-blade server with additional storage units, intended to be "an entire business in a box for an SME customer". The additional memory space built in allows for virtualisation, with the components of the server being interchangeable with existing blade products.

The six blades could typically be used for firewall, voice over IP, e-mail, backup and recovery, print, and file applications. IBM says a mid-size company of 100 to 1 000 employees runs 25 to 45 servers on average, which can be reduced by 85% on the new BladeCenterS.

The BladeCentreS is available as of the third quarter of 2007.

Change in thinking

According to Wanduragala, "the blade market will explode" following the launch of the new server, but he accedes the net effect of virtualisation is "less physical servers will go out the door". For this reason he says IBM will move to services as an additional revenue stream, as he maintains "everybody loses revenue" under a virtualisation model if they only look at hardware for income.

Wanduragala says IBM will also advise its clients to expand into services for this reason. "It's about reach and teach." While IBM can provide services to its resellers, those companies can in turn provide services to their clients.

"Virtualisation is the killer application for the industry," he says, as it allows for independence from hardware, necessitating a change in traditional business thinking.

Backup for SMEs

In the meantime, IBM, Business Partners, the International Finance Corporation and the Department of Trade and Industry have teamed up to provide an online toolkit for SMEs. The Web site provides both online and offline tools and is intended to help SMEs start, finance, and grow their businesses.

Among the features of the site are finance calculators, Web site building software, and Web 2.0 features such as live chat, online forums, business directories, and survey capabilities.