• Offer exceptional price/performance and flexibility through advanced IBM POWER5+ technology
• Designed to provide easy scalability to meet unexpected business demands
• Provide new levels of productivity and server utilisation with optional virtualization capabilities

The System p5 550 Express and p5 550Q Express servers are members of the IBM System p5 Express family of affordable, high-performing servers designed for clients who want uncompromising flexibility, availability and security features in an entry system. As the next generation IBM p5 550 Express server built to meet the requirements of the on demand world, they deliver up to 8-way scalability, outstanding price/performance, exceptional RAS (reliability, availability, serviceability) features, innovative virtualization technology and a three (3)-year warranty at an affordable price. Powered by IBM's most advanced 64-bit processor, POWER5+, with simultaneous multithreading for increased system utilisation and improved application performance, these servers can run the UNIX and Linux operating systems simultaneously and support critical applications with exceptional price/performance—all while helping improve availability and responsiveness.

The System p5 550 Express system is a 4-way database server with 1.9GHz POWER5+ dual-core modules. It can function as a scalable database or versatile departmental or regional server for businesses of all sizes. The performance, reliability and affordability features of the p5-550 Express can make it a strategic platform for scalable database servers, e-commerce application servers, Web servers, operations systems, and for BI and high performance computing (HPC) workloads.

Common Features

• 19" rack-mount packaging
• 2-way SMP design
• 64-bit POWER5+ technology
• Mainframe-inspired RAS features
• Dynamic LPAR support
• Advanced POWER Virtualization (options)
  • Micro-Partitioning (up to 20 micro-partitions)
  • Shared processor pool
  • Virtual I/O Server with Integrated Virtualization Manager
  • Partition Load Manager (AIX 5L only)
• Up to eight optional I/O drawers
• HACMP support for near continuous operation
• Supported by AIX 5L (V5.2 and V5.3) and Linux distributions from Red Hat, Inc. (RHEL AS 4) and SUSE LINUX (SLES 9)

Hardware Summary

• Deskside or 4U 19" rack-mount packaging
• Two or four 64-bit 1.90GHz POWER5+ processors
• 1.9MB L2 and 36MB L3 cache per processor pair
• 1GB to 64GB of 533MHz DDR2 SDRAM
• Five PCI-X adapter slots (4 - 133MHz; 1 - 266MHz (DDR))
• Two GX+ IO adapter slots (shared with two PCI-X slots)
• Four standard and four optional hot-swappable SCSI disk bays for up to 2.4TB of internal storage
• Maximum I/O drawers add an additional 54 PCI-X slots and 96 disk bays (28.8TB)
• Dual channel Ultra320 SCSI controller (internal only; RAID optional)
• Dual ported Ethernet 10/100/1000 Mbps controller
• Optional 2 Gigabit Fibre Channel, 10 Gigabit Ethernet and 4x InfiniBand adapters
• Two USB, two HMC, two system ports
• Two slimline and one half-high media bays