IBM Takes New Tack in Server War
In the market for low-end computer servers, the mantra of late has been "cheaper is better."
Businesses buy millions of the machines each year to handle basic processing tasks, and costs have fallen precipitously as the equipment becomes ubiquitous and standardized.
But International Business Machines Corp. is taking a different tack. Unable to compete on price with low-cost leader Dell Inc., IBM is trying to buck the trend and make a commodity device better, hoping that users will pay more for added oomph.
IBM is expected today to unveil a new "chipset" -- industry lingo for the collection of auxiliary circuitry that surrounds a processor -- that it says increases the performance and capabilities of a plain-vanilla, low-end server. (Low-end servers are often called "Intel servers" because Intel Corp.'s chips power most of them.)
The chipset, dubbed x3, will run in conjunction with central processing chips from Intel inside some of IBM 's low-end servers. A typical four-processor configuration will cost around $12,500, IBM says.
Big Blue has been making performance enhancements to Intel servers for years, but executives say this iteration is the most advanced yet, drawing on features from IBM 's flagship mainframes as well as from its higher-end servers running the Unix operating system.
X3 designers included "literally the same people who worked on" the mainframe, says Susan Whitney, who runs IBM 's low-end server unit. The chipset includes speed boosts such as an extra layer of "cache" -- a chunk of high-speed memory -- positioned close to the processor to reduce the amount of time the chip waits for needed data.
The build-a-better-mousetrap philosophy didn't catch on for IBM 's personal-computer business, which tried to get users to pay for extra innovation and was saddled with continued losses as Dell drove prices down. IBM recently agreed to sell the PC business to China's Lenovo Group Ltd.
That value-added strategy seems to have worked better for IBM , though, in the low-end server market, which industrywide had nearly $19 billion in sales in 2003, according to market researcher IDC. After languishing in the late 1990s as Dell zoomed past, IBM has picked up some ground in recent years. Its share of Intel server market revenue was 19% compared with Dell's 22.2% for the first nine months of 2004, according to IDC data, narrowing a gap that was as large as five percentage points in 2001. Hewlett-Packard Co. is No. 1, with a 32.9% share for the first nine months of 2004.
IBM sold $3.4 billion of Intel servers in 2003, according to IDC, a small fraction of the company's $89 billion in overall revenue that year.
Servers built around the Intel architecture are the utilitymen of the technology infrastructure. Businesses use scads of them to handle common processing tasks, such as serving up Web pages, delivering e-mail or coordinating repositories of users' documents. IBM 's bet is that by making a better commodity server, it can also grab some of the work such as database processing -- normally handled by more expensive servers running more powerful chips and the Unix operating system.
Ms. Whitney says the x3 chipset may also encroach on the territory carved out by Intel's Itanium chip, which was jointly developed with rival H-P.
Intel says systems built around the higher-powered Itanium won't be threatened by the IBM machines. "It's an incredibly diverse market in terms of workloads, usage models and customer needs," says Abhi Talwalkar, an Intel corporate vice president.
IBM在伺服器大战中采取新战略
在低端电脑伺服器市场，最新的箴言就是“越便宜越好”。
但国际商业机器公司(IBM)却采取了截然不同的战略。鉴于无法与低成本领头羊戴尔公司(Dell Inc., DELL)在价格上一争高低，IBM正努力逆势而为，生产性能更好的低端伺服器，希望用户愿意为产品的更多性能而支付较高的价钱。
预计IBM今日将推出一款新式晶片组（低端伺服器常被成为“英特尔伺服器”，因为绝大多数的低端伺服器都采用了英特尔公司(Intel)生产的晶片产品）。该公司表示，新晶片组能够提高低端伺服器的性能。
IBM的一些低端伺服器将采用这种名为X3的晶片组与英特尔中央处理晶片搭配的方式。IBM称，典型的4处理器配置的这种伺服器大约售价12,500美元。
数年以来，IBM一直致力于提高英特尔伺服器的性能，但管理人士称，本次即将面世的晶片组是IBM最先进的产品，该产量结合了IBM的旗舰主机及其采用Unix操作系统的高端伺服器的特点
