IBM rethinks industry-standard servers

IBM introduced a new class of industry standard servers that it hopes will widen its market share lead and put rivals like HP and Dell on defense.

Big Blue revealed on March 2 its new family of servers dubbed the eX5 portfolio, and it features architecture tweaks that allow the customer to add more memory without buying an entirely new server. IBM spent three years engineering the systems, which was previewed at CeBIT in Germany.

IBM plans to alter the industry standard server return equation via memory expansion options and an extra chip that’s designed to coach the system to better performance. IBM said it will announce three eX5 systems through 2010: A four processor version; a new blade design; and an entry-priced two-processor server.

Read more of "IBM hopes to upend industry standard server ROI equation" at ZDNet.com.