IBM has  launched a very interesting product lately: the JS22 blade.  The IBM JS22 blade server has two dual-core Power6 CPUs, clocked at an impressive 4 GHz. Even more interesting is the honesty of the IBM marketing team about the Sun x4450 server. IBM took the Peak SpecInt2006 of several servers published on spec.org and made a price/performance (using the online price configurators at IBM, Sun and HP) and a performance divided by power (Source: online power calculators) comparison.

 

Now look at the results at IBM's sales presentation: 

 

 

So according to IBM's (based on SPEC) numbers, Sun has a winner here. The calculated power numbers are probably a bit higher than the real ones. Also, the Sun Fire x4450 did use the power hungry Intel x7350 CPUs. If one would use the 7340, you would get less than 20% performance loss with probably 50% less power. So, the numbers above could get even better for Sun's latest server. IBM feels that "security, reliability, operations and less cabling" should convince buyers to go the blade JS22 route anyway.

 

 

 

As we are currently testing the x4450, we are very curious about your opinion. Do you feel that density is important? With the exception of the UK, most public datacenters here in Western Europe are not charging a lot for rackspace. The reason is that as more and more larger companies have their own datacenter, public datacenters have a lot of unused rackspace. It really show the difference between reality and what the media is reporting. Most reports in the media are talking about how datacenters are running out of space and power. The latter seems to be true, but the space problems seems to be highly exaggerated.

 

So what is on top of your checklist when you shop for a new server? Performance/Watt? Does "less cabling" make an  impression on you? What about the rather vague statements like "reliability and operation"? Let us know.