"For years, combatants in the heated server market have
stressed the speed and power at which their latest products can
render calculations. While this is no less important today, firms
such as IBM are looking for other ways to differentiate themselves
from competitors. In IBM's case this includes Hewlett-Packard and
Sun Microsystems.
Big Blue has been especially busy blowing off steam with cooler
servers since October as part of a push to conserve energy needs in
the computing sector and stand apart from its rivals. On Wednesday,
the firm added to its eServer family a new p610 that supposedly
sucks up as much as 57 percent less electricity and expends 63
percent less heat than a comparable Sun solution, a 280R. The p610
is a low-end system designed for e-business tasks such as customer
relationship management, enterprise resource planning, and sales
force automation. It runs both Unix and Linux.
As for the energy conservation, the new eServer includes RAID 5
storage technology inside the server cabinet rather than in a
separate device. This eliminates the need for a second power
supply. RAID allows a large number of disks to be treated by a
system as a single storage device. More disks means multiple
backups for data."
