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 2010
IBM System x3550 M3
Product Overview
CONTENTS
Product Overview
1
Selling Features
2
Key Features
4
Key Options
13
x3550 M3 Images
14
x3550 M3 Specifications
15
The Bottom Line
18
Server Comparison
19
For More Information
20
Legal Information
20
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 lowering your overall risk. The dual-
socket IBM
®
System x3550 M3 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 M3 offers you the trust that comes from the IBM global reach, service and
support.
The x3550 M3 is a game-changing rack server that uses significantly less power than previous
generations, with unified systems management tools, leadership reliability, availability, and
serviceability features and broad systems flexibility housed in a compact 1U mechanical package.
The x3550 M3 features Intel
®
Xeon
®
5600 Series 6-core and 4-core, and 5500 Series 4-core
processors, with up to 12MB of shared L3 cache, to provide you with the computing power you
need to match your business needs and growth. The new line of Intel processors delivers
unprecedented intelligent performance with features like adaptive performance for applications
and environments, Turbo Boost Technology and Hyper-Threading Technology, and integrated
power gates and automated power management.
The x3550 M3 supports up to 18 DIMMs / 192GB of registered (RDIMM) 1333MHz DDR3
memory (or up to 12 DIMMs / 24GB of unbuffered UDIMM memory) and provides Chipkill
™
ECC
(Error Checking and Correcting) protection—for high performance and reliability. For even higher
levels of availability, the x3550 M3 also offers memory mirroring. Up to 4 integrated high-speed
Gigabit Ethernet controllers are available (offering TOE (TCP Offload Engine) support on
Microsoft
®
Windows
®
), as are two high-performance adapter slots (PCIe x16). The x3650 M3
offers an optional embedded hypervisor to manage your virtual workloads.
The x3550 M3 offers a choice of up to supports up to 8 high-performance hot-swap HDDs with an
internal storage capacity of 4.0TB (2.5-inch hot-swap Serial-Attached SCSI (SAS) or Serial-
Attached ATA (SATA) drives). Alternatively, up to 8 solid-state drives (SSDs) are also
available to keep power low, improve resiliency, and offer up to 400GB of storage. The server
includes a choice of several IBM ServeRAID
®
storage controllers that 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 504 processor cores, offering tremendous deployment flexibility.
Standard in the x3550 M3 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 M3 comes with an altitude sensor (altimeter) that 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 fan modules; Active Memory
™
;
integrated 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 legacy
BIOS with a new generation United Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). UEFI provides a
more intuitive user interface and understandable event logs and better management.