It's been a while since my last post, probably longer than
I'd usually like to leave it, but you can put that down to a busy start to Q4.
IBM x3550 (7978)
When?
2006, the year that Saddam Hussein's
death sentence was carried out and England's 'golden generation' of
footballers were dumped out of the German hosted 2006 world cup on penalties to
Portugal. This was the year that IBM announced it's first system which
would incorporate Intel's highly anticipated Dempsey processor,
seen as the savior which could slay the AMD 200 series.
The X3550 was the first example of IBM's new Systems
branding and previewed what was to come across all their tower, rack and
blade products. What was previously known as the eserver and Xseries was
replaced with the System family name, with the model number indicating what
hardware each model possesses.
What was really good?
IBM spared no expense with the the internal design, it
really was second to none. I've just popped the top cover on one of these
systems in our warehouse and the first thing you see is the
enormous heat-sinks and bays.On powering on, I notice that the fans
are all hot-swappable, and noise levels aren't excessive considering the amount
of air that needs to be shifted.
The X3550 also supported fully buffered DIMM (FB-DIMM)
memory, something that not all competitors were using at the time of release
and which improved performance due to the use of advanced memory buffers.
What was really bad?
The x3550 systems shipped with Intel's Dempsey
processor. At time of release the new low power Woodcrest 5100 wasn't to far
away. I don't personally understand why anyone would have bought into Dempsey.
The 5000 chipset did allow an upgrade path to the Woodcrest 5100 series,
however, Dempsey take up was limited, as some of IBM's main competitors skipped
it completely in favour of Woodcrest.
Covenco UK Ltd are the brokerage division of the Covenco
Group. Specializing in end of life and second user hardware they help clients
pro long the life of their existing hardware infrastructure, offering: buy,sell
and rental options across the complete IBM system x and storage portfolio
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