IBM has introduced the NeXtScale System™, a flexible computing platform providing three times as many cores as current one-unit rack servers, making it ideal for the fastest growing workloads such as social media, analytics, technical computing, and cloud delivery.
The rapid adoption of these workloads and delivery models is putting increased demands on data centers and clients are looking for new technologies that meet those demands with the highest performance and the lowest power consumption to drive high efficiency and lower costs. NeXtScale is the latest addition to IBM's x86 portfolio, designed specifically to run those applications with the power of a supercomputer in any data center, via a simple, flexible and open architecture that will support options for compute, storage, and graphics processing acceleration.
This new system incorporates up to 84 x86-based systems and 2,016 processing cores in a standard EIA 19-in. rack, allowing easy integration into any data center. It uses industry-standard components including I/O cards and top-of-rack networking switches for flexibility of choice and ease of adoption. IBM also provides a powerful software stack to run on top of NeXtScale, including IBM General Parallel File System, GPFS Storage Server, xCAT, and Platform Computing, providing powerful scheduling, management and optimization tools.
The result is a single architecture based on open standards that delivers high performance and high efficiency, and that is designed to blend seamlessly with clients' data centers, current practices and x86 tools. NeXtScale's design can help clients better manage their operations and capital expenditure budgets by allowing them to maximize the compute power in a minimum amount of space in their data centers. Because of its standard-rack form factor and broad use of industry-standard components, IBM Business Partners can now deliver IBM's high performance computing technology to a broad range of users.
"NeXtScale is designed to deliver raw throughput and performance, and is positioned well to handle HPC, cloud, grid, and managed hosted workloads," said Kevin Rozynek, NASA client executive at IBM Business Partner Direct Systems Support. "In addition, this new system provides clients a great deal of flexibility in configuration and components, making it one platform that can do it all."
NeXtScale is ideal for:
- Large data centers requiring efficiency, density, scale, and scalability;
- Public, private and hybrid cloud infrastructures;
- Data analytics applications like customer relationship management, operational optimization, risk/financial management, and new business models;
- Internet media applications such as online gaming and video streaming;
- High-resolution imaging for applications ranging from medicine to oil and gas exploration;
- "Departmental" uses where a small solution can increase the speed of outcome prediction, engineering analysis, and design and modeling.
In addition, IBM also introduced the x3650 M4 HD, an enhancement of its 3650-class system featuring first-in-class 12-gigabyte RAID and a 60-percent higher spindle count for higher density storage and higher IO performance, making it ideal for applications such as big data and business-critical workloads. IBM NeXtScale and System x3650 M4 HD are two new entries headlining a broad refresh of the entire System x core server portfolio of two-socket systems including System x racks and towers, Flex System, iDataPlex, and BladeCenter offerings. All of these offerings will feature the new Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 v2 product family, providing performance increases of up to 45 percent*.
"By delivering high flexibility, ultra performance and great efficiency in an industry-standard format with a powerful software stack, NeXtScale provides our clients with a versatile new data center solution that is easy to qualify, acquire and deploy," said Adalio Sanchez, General Manager, IBM System x. "The introduction of NeXtScale and the other offerings and enhancements we're announcing today illustrate our continuing commitment to providing high-value, high-performance x86-based solutions to our clients."