IBM have just release a new blade aimed at running virtualised workloads, named the HS22V. This is ahead of the soon to be released blade using IBM’s 5th generation of their Enterprise x-Architecture, the HX5.
The HS22V sports either an Intel 55xx series Nehalem-EP processor or the newly announced Intel 56xx seires Westmere-EP, including the 6 core X5650, X5670 and the low power (60w) L5640.
To allow many Virtual Machines to run on these HS22V blades making the most of the faster processors available 18 very low profile DDR3 memory slots will be available, an improvement over the 12 available on the HS22. As with memory on the Nehalem processors if all 18 memory slots are filled the memory will run at 800Mhz, with 12 slots filled 1033Mhz and if only 6 slots filled (assuming this is spread over 2 processors with 3 memory DIMMs per processor) 1333Mhz (as long as the processor is capable of 1333Mhz).
Whereas the HS22 uses up to 2 Hot-Swap SAS/SATA hard disk drives the HS22V uses Solid State 1.8in SATA drives. Again 2 can be installed and mirrored using the integrated RAID1 controller. The only option currently available is a 50GB drive, which is plenty for the installation of VMware vSphere ESX or Microsoft HyperV (interestingly HyperV is not currently certified to run on this blade). It is possible that 64GB Solid State Drives will be available later this year for the HS22V. These Solid State Drives use a lot less power and generate less heat than traditional spinning disks.