IBM Corp. is now shipping a server with 16 of Intel Corp."s Xeon processors that fits into an 8U (14-inch) rack space, it announced Wednesday.
IBM announced the eServer x440 in April as a four-way system. With Wednesday"s announcement, the company is following through on its commitment to allow its customers to expand their x440 servers as their processing demands increase, said Deepak Advani, vice president for IBM eServer xSeries servers.
The x440 can now support a 16-processor configuration. Users can either upgrade their existing servers, or purchase a new 16-way server as of Wednesday, Advani said.
Intel"s older Foster Xeon chips, not the most recently announced Gallatin Xeons, provide the processing power behind the eServer x440. Configurations with the newer Gallatin chips, which have faster clock speeds and higher cache, will be available in the first quarter of 2003, Advani said.
Large databases will be the primary applications run on 16-way x440 servers, said Brad Day, senior analyst at Giga Information Group Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Customers will also likely run complex software such as ERP (enterprise resource planning) or CRM (customer relationship management) software on this server, he said.