Product guide

Ultrascalability combined with extreme availability
features and industry-leading performance
Please see the Legal Information section for important notices and information.
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system.
Up to four QPI cables connect the MAX5 to the host x3850/x3950 X5 at speeds up to
6.4Gbps (processor-specific), providing exceptional interchassis throughput (100GBps
aggregate). With two chassis and two MAX5 units, up to three EXA cables connect to the
secondary node at speeds up to 10Gbps (processor-specific), supported by L4 cache, to
provide exceptional internode throughput (48GBps aggregate).
Because of this design, an x3850/x3950 X5 server has the incredible flexibility of starting out
as a 4-socket server with up to 1TB of memory, seven PCIe adapter slots, and eight HDD
bays or 16 SSD bays, and then doubling the processors, cache, slots, and HDD bays, and
tripling the memory, while maintaining first-in-class performance.
The MAX5 scalability and memory expansion feature is a unique IBM enhancement, not
offered by other x86 server architectures.
XceL4v Dynamic Server Cache
A key performance feature of MAX5 expansion is the XceL4v L4 cache. When using a two-
node (10U) x3850/x3950 X5 with two MAX5 units, 512MB of virtual cache (256MB per node
taken from main memory) is allocated to improve inter-node memory latency by caching
memory accesses to the remote (second) node.
XceL4V virtual L4 cache is another IBM-unique enhancement.
Flexible Internal Storage Capacity
The eX5 servers offer a choice of internal storage, supporting up to eight (2.5-inch) hot-
swap Serial-Attach SCSI (SAS) or Serial ATA (SATA) hard disk drives, or up to sixteen 1.8-
inch solid-state drives (SSDs) per chassis (using the IBM eXFlash option). In addition, two
IBM High IOPS SSD adapters can be used per node/chassis.
2.5-inch SAS
• 7,200 RPMs — 160, 500GB (4.0TB maximum per chassis; 8TB in a 2-chassis
configuration)
• 10,000 RPMs — 73.4, 146.8, 300, or 600GB (4.8TB per chassis; 9.6TB per 2-chassis)
• 15,000 RPMs — 73.4 or 146.8GB (1.174TB per chassis; 2.35TB per 2 chassis)
2.5-inch SATA
• 7,200 RPMs — 160 or 500GB (4.0TB)
1.8-inch SSD
• 50, 200GB (3.2TB per chassis; 6.4TB per 2-chassis)
o High I/O Performance
– Offers up to 8X more IOPS than HDDs (67/33% read/write OLTP transaction base
mix);
– Optimized for heavy mix of read and write operations, such as transaction
processing, media streaming, surveillance, file copy, logging, backup / recovery, and
business Intelligence
o Lower-Cost IOPS Performance
– Yields better $/IOPS: lower capacity (GB) required to achieve higher IOPS
– Consumes less energy and produces less heat than a conventional disk drive
o Superior Uptime
– 3X the reliability of mechanical disk drives
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– No moving parts to fail
– Enterprise wear-leveling to extend life even further
o Full OS Support
– Supports all ServerProven
®
OSes
For read-intensive transactional workloads requiring extreme IOPS performance, such as
database, video-on-demand, and caching, IBM offers High IOPS SSD PCIe Adapters,
equivalent to the IOPS output of approximately 500
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3.5-inch 600GB 15K SAS HDDs, with
99% lower latency (30 µs), and 7.7x the bandwidth of a HDD. On a performance-per-watt
basis, these adapters outperform HDDs by up to 445x
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.
High IOPS SSD PCIe Adapters
• IBM 160GB High IOPS SS Class SSD PCIe Adapter (x4 Gen 1—100K IOPS, 750MBps)
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Machine type 7143 only.