Leadership enterprise server with significantly lower cost of ownership in a highly available and
expandable, rack-dense, 1U dual-socket server
Please see the Legal Information section for important notices and information. 1
Product Guide
March 2009
IBM System x3550 M2
Product Overview
CONTENTS
Product Overview 1
Selling Features 2
Key Features 4
Key Options 12
x3550 M2 Images 14
x3550 M2 Specifications 15
The Bottom Line 17
Server Comparison 18
For More Information 19
Legal Information 19
Outstanding innovation in only 1U
Suggested Uses: All sectors requiring highly available, energy-efficient, rack-optimized solution
for physical and virtual intensive commercial environments like eBusiness/eCommerce,
collaboration, virtualization, database, and enterprise resource planning applications.
Your challenge is to do more with less—serve more Web pages, handle more secure
connections, support more e-mail users. You need to reduce the costs of doing business and
improve the service you deliver to your customers while lower your overall risk. The dual-socket
IBM® System x3550 M2 can reduce your costs with its new energy smart design. It can improve
service with reduced operational complexity and increased management functionality. It will lower
your IT risk with the resiliency that comes from no single point of failure. And like all IBM servers,
the x3550 M2 offers you the trust that comes from the IBM global reach, service and support.
The x3550 M2 is not simply an upgrade to a previous server. It is one of our new generation of
X-Architecture servers. It is a game-changing, completely redesigned rack server using
significantly less power with unified systems management tools, leadership reliability, availability,
serviceability features and broad systems flexibitliyt housed in a compact 1U mechanical
package.
The x3550 M2 features Intel® Xeon® 5500 Series Processors and either 8MB or 4MB of shared
cache, to help provide you with the computing power you need to match your business needs
and growth. This new line of Intel processors delivers unprecedented intelligent performance with
features like adaptive performance for applications and environments, turbo boost and hyper-
threading technology, and integrated power gates and automated power management.
The x3550M2 uses up to 16 DIMMs with 128GB of registered 1333MHz DDR3 memory with
Chipkill™ ECC (Error Checking and Correcting) protection—for high performance and reliability.
For even higher levels of availability, the x3550M2 also offers online memory mirroring. Up to 4
integrated high-speed Gigabit Ethernet controllers with TOE (TCP Offload Engine) and Jumbo
Frame support are available, as are two high-performance adapter slots (PCIe x16). The
x3550M2 offers an optional embedded hypervisor to manage your virtual workloads.
The x3550 M2 offers a choice of up to six high-performance hot-swap hard disk drives with an
internal storage capacity of 1.8TB (six 2.5-inch hot-swap Serial-Attached SCSI (SAS) or SATA
HDDs) Optional solid-state drives are also available to keep power low and improve resiliency and
offer up to 300GB of storage. The server supports a choice of four IBM ServeRAID® storage
controllers which provide broad levels of hardware-based RAID solutions. The ultradense 1U
form factor allows businesses to increase their computing power and spread their workload
without outgrowing their current data center. Up to 42 of these 1U servers can be installed in a
single 42U rack, for a total of up to 84 processors and 336 processor cores, offering tremendous
deployment flexibility. Optional Advanced Connectivity Technology (ACT) interconnect cabling
reduces cable clutter and cost and minimizes installation time when interconnecting many rack-
mounted servers.
Standard in the x3550 M2 is the Integrated Management Module (IMM) that enables the user to
manage and control the server easily—both locally and remotely. In conjunction with the IMM, the
x3550 M2 comes with an altitude sensor (altimeter), which governs fan rotation based on
altitude to help lower your energy consumption. The IMM offers a high level of manageability that
is designed to keep costs down and the system up—even when network usage increases. IBM’s
innovative pop-out/drop-down light path diagnostics panel enables quick servicing of the
system if a problem develops. These advanced features help maximize network availability by
increasing uptime, as do hot simple-swap solid-state drives; hot-swap/redundant SAS or
SATA HDDs, redundant ultra-efficient power supplies and fans; Active Memory™; i ntegrated
RAID; temperature-controlled fans with Calibrated Vectored Cooling™; IPMI 2.0 support,
including highly secure remote power control and Serial over LAN; as well as text-console
redirect over LAN.
Another improvement with the new generation of X-Architecture is the replacement of old BIOS