Michael Dolan Dot Com

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

IBM Launches New Approach to Servers (errr… a twist on the Google approach) - and it’s all based on Linux

IBM launched its iDataPlex server systems today - think of it as a “Google” for your datacenter. It’s targeted at web workloads and is insanely dense and power efficient compared to traditional server buildouts. And it uses Linux on commodity hardware so it’s also ridiculously cheap. If you’re a web hosting shop or you have your own web farm that could use a serious overhaul, iDataPlex is a very cool solution.

Did I mention it only runs Linux?

Ashlee Vance cracks me up - it’s clear from this article he’s been talking to vendors for two long (see the last sentence in this quote):

The system itself is quite remarkable. IBM has reworked its approach to rack servers allowing it to place twice as many systems in a single cabinet. This attack centers on delivering the most horsepower possible in a given area while also reducing power consumption. IBM hopes the iDataPlex unit will attract today’s service providers buying thousands and tens of thousands of servers and also big businesses such as oil and gas firms and media companies that will also possibly pursue a grid-ish data center computing model pioneered to some degree by Google.

But the really awe inspiring bit of iDataPlex comes from the fact that IBM is willing to go after this market at all and that it did so without screwing up the hardware design.

Ars covered the details as well over here: