IBM Redbooks x3850 X5 Product Manual

Also see for Redbooks x3850 X5: Installation and user guide Problem determination and service guide

Contents

IBM System x3850 X5 2Key featuresThe x3850 X5 is a mission-critical 4U four-socket server, capable of expanding to up to 8 processorsockets and 6 TB of memory in 10U of rack space. It offering outstanding performance, and superiorreliability and fault-tolerant memory characteristics.IBM® has been designing and implementing servers under the X-Architecture® name since 2001. IBMeX5 technology represents the fifth generation of enterprise servers based on the same design principleIBM began with in 1997: to offer systems that are expandable, offer “big iron” reliability, availability, andserviceability (RAS) features, with extremely competitive price/performance on an Intel Xeonprocessor-based system.Scalability and performanceThe x3850 X5 offers numerous features to boost performance, improve scalability, and reduce costs:The x3850 X5 supports up to four high-performance Intel Xeon E7 family allowing you to upgrade asbusiness needs require.Scalable to eight processors by connecting two x3850 X5 servers together to form a single systemimage.Each x3850 X5 scalable to 2 TB of memory internally or 3 TB of memory with the addition of theMAX5 V2 memory expansion unit. With two x3850 X5 servers each with MAX5 units, the totalavailable system memory is up to 6 TB.Supports the Intel Xeon E7-2800, E7-4800 and E7-8800 families of high performance processors, upto 10 cores each, offering superior system performanceIntel Turbo Boost Technology dynamically turns off unused processor cores and increases the clockspeed of the cores in use, by up to three model frequencies. For example, with 7-10 cores active, a2.4 GHz E7-2870 10-core processor can run the cores at up to 2.53 GHz. With 5-6 cores active, it canrun those cores at 2.67 GHz; with only 1-4 cores active, it can run those cores at 2.8 GHzEach processor includes two integrated memory controllers, to reduce memory bottlenecks andimprove performance. Memory access is at up to 1066 MHz frequency, depending on the processormodel and memory used.The MAX5 V2 adds an additional four memory controllers for a total of eight memory controllers tomaximize memory parallelism and performance.In processors implementing Hyper-Threading technology, each core has two threads capable ofrunning an independent process. Thus, an 8-core processor can run 16 threads concurrently.Intel’s Virtualization Technology (VT) integrates hardware-level virtualization hooks that allowoperating system vendors to better utilize the hardware for virtualization workloads.Intel QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) technology for processor-to-processor connectivity and IntelScalable Memory Interconnect (SMI) processor-to-memory connectivity:Intel QPI link topology at up to 6.4 Gbps with four QPI links per CPUIntel SMI link topology at up to 6.4 Gbps with four SMI links per CPUUp to 64 DIMM sockets in the server (eight per memory card), plus an additional 32 DIMMs with anoptional 1U MAX5 V2 memory expansion unit, for a total of 96 DIMM sockets. With two x3850 X5servers each with MAX5 units, the total number of DIMM sockets is 192.The use of solid-state drives (SSDs) instead of, or along with, traditional spinning drives (HDDs) cansignificantly improve I/O performance. An SSD can support up to 100 times more I/O operations persecond (IOPS) than a typical HDD.Up to 24 1.8-inch SSD bays, or up to 16 2.5-inch bays together with the option of an optical drive,provide a flexible and scalable all-in-one platform to meet your increasing demands.