IBM eX5 flexible - Blade server

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The industry's first scalable blade server with independent memory expansion

Going beyond the industry standards with unique innovations, the new IBM BladeCenter® HX5 offers unparalleled value for your business critical applications. HX5 delivers unprecedented compute performance, memory footprint and I/O bandwidth to enable maximum utilisation in a blade form factor for compute- and memory-intensive enterprise workloads.

Watch an animated demo of BladeCenter HX5 features and benefits.

Why choose BladeCenter HX5?

Faster time to value with eX5 enterprise class blade servers

With the BladeCenter HX5, get up and running up to four times faster by standardising on a single platform for 2- and 4-socket server needs. Design your system to fit your workloads, instead of trying to fit your workloads onto a rigid system. With FlexNode partitioning, you can reconfigure a 4-processor system as two 2-processor systems-without physical reconfiguration. Use BladeCenter Open Fabric Manager to pre-configure and automate the failover of HX5 blades. You can optimise system utilisation, license cost and other operational costs. The independent scaling of CPU and memory with eX5 delivers customised performance, enabling maximum utilisation.
Ideal platform for enterprise workloads

HX5 delivers the performance, reliability and versatility to handle your enterprise workloads. Move off proprietary platforms like Sun SPARC and HP with Itanium to a cost efficient, industry standard platform with enhanced system redundancy and no single point of failure.
Optimal server consolidation

Consolidate your data centre on HX5 and increase utilisation, simplify systems management and reduce operating costs. The HX5 delivers the most memory per core compared to any server in its class, enabling more and larger virtual machines per server. Reduce your software license costs by expanding memory capacity with MAX5 without purchasing additional processors. And with virtual fabric I/O support, you get maximum I/O throughput and flexibility.

Key features

IBM BladeCenter® HX5 is a scalable, high-performance blade server with unprecedented compute and memory performance, and flexibility ideal for compute and memory-intensive enterprise workloads. The HX5 features:

Intel® Xeon® processor 6500 and 7500 series, pushing the limits on scalable performance.
Greater memory capacity, with MAX5, enabling more or larger VMs per server
Enhanced computing capacity for more transactions per minute in a blade server
FlexNode partitioning and pay-as-you-grow expansion offer great investment protection and maximum system uptime