Key Features; Scalability And Performance - Lenovo System x3550 M4 Product Manual

Key features

The x3550 M4 is a cost- and density-balanced 1U, 2-socket business-critical server, offering improved
performance and pay-as-you grow flexibility along with new features that improve server management
capability. The powerful system is designed for your most important business applications and cloud
deployments.
Combining balanced performance and flexibility, the x3550 M4 is a great choice for small and medium
businesses and up to the large enterprise. It can provide outstanding uptime to keep business-critical
applications and cloud deployments running safely. Ease-of-use and comprehensive systems management
tools make it easy to deploy. Outstanding RAS and high-efficiency design improves your business environment
and helps save operational costs.

Scalability and performance

The x3550 M4 offers numerous features to boost performance, improve scalability, and reduce costs:
Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v2 product family
Improves productivity by offering superior system performance with up to 12-core processors, up
to 30 MB of L3 cache, and up to two 8 GT/s QPI interconnect links.
Supports up to two processors, 24 cores, and 48 threads maximize the concurrent execution of
multi-threaded applications.
Supports up to 1866 MHz memory speeds.
Supports up to 768 GB memory with 32 GB LRDIMMs.
Intelligent and adaptive system performance with Intel Turbo Boost Technology 2.0 allows CPU cores to
run at maximum speeds during peak workloads by temporarily going beyond processor thermal design
power (TDP).
Intel Hyper-Threading Technology boosts performance for multithreaded applications by enabling
simultaneous multithreading within each processor core, up to two threads per core.
Intel Virtualization Technology integrates hardware-level virtualization hooks that allow operating system
vendors to better utilize the hardware for virtualization workloads.
Intel Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) significantly improve floating point performance for compute-
intensive technical and scientific applications compared to Intel Xeon 5600 series processors.
12 Gbps SAS internal storage connectivity doubles the data transfer rate compared to 6 Gb SAS
solutions to maximize performance of storage I/O-intensive applications.
The use of solid-state drives (SSDs) instead of or along with traditional spinning drives (HDDs) can
significantly improve I/O performance. An SSD can support up to 100 times more I/O operations per
second (IOPS) than a typical HDD.
The server has four integrated Gigabit Ethernet ports and two optional 10 Gb Ethernet ports with
mezzanine cards that do not consume a PCIe slot.
The server offers PCI Express (PCIe) 3.0 I/O expansion capabilities that improve the theoretical
maximum bandwidth by almost 100% (8 GTps per link using 128b/130b encoding) compared to the
previous generation of PCI Express 2.0 (5 GTps per link using 8b/10b encoding).
With Intel Integrated I/O Technology, the PCI Express 3.0 controller is integrated into the Intel Xeon
processor E5 family. This helps to dramatically reduce I/O latency and increase overall system
performance.
Support for NVIDIA Quadro graphics processing units (GPUs) to maximize computing power.
Availability and serviceability
The x3550 M4 provides many features to simplify serviceability and increase system uptime:
The server offers memory mirroring and memory rank sparing for redundancy in the event of a non-
correctable memory failure.
Tool-less cover removal provides easy access to upgrades and serviceable parts, such as CPU,
memory, and adapter cards.
System x3550 M4 (E5-2600 v2) (withdrawn product) 2