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Intel Westmere Chips Usher in Next-Gen Green Servers

<p>With the launch yesterday of the company's latest and most energy efficient 32-nm processors, hardware manufacturers and data center managers got a big boost in their green IT efforts.</p>

Intel yesterday unveiled its newest and most energy efficient 32-nm processors, giving hardware manufacturers and data center managers a big boost in their green IT efforts. 

The company's Xeon Processor 5600 series, formerly codenamed Westmere, and manufacturers including IBM, Dell and many others announced new servers to make use of the speed and efficiency of the new chipsets.

IBM released two new rack servers in its System x M3 and Blade Center systems; the x3650 M3 uses 50 percent less energy than the previous generation of servers, the company said. The two new IBM enterprise tower servers have twice the storage and use use a fraction of the energy.

IBM also added new BladeCenters to its lineup of Westmere servers. The new units hold 30 to 50 percent more virtual machines per blade, and consume 15 percent elss power.

Dell released yesterday new PowerEdge blade, rack and tower servers to accomodate the new 5600 chips, which the company said can show up to 47 percent improvements in energy efficiency over Dell servers that used the previous generation of Intel chips.

Dell also touted the energy efficient design of its PowerEdge line, including "right-sized" power supply units, Energy Smart components, and policy-driven power and heat management.

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