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Top server makers on Tuesday announced major product upgrades with Intel's new Xeon E5 processors and technologies that deliver better performance and throughput for robust virtualization and cloud deployments in data centers.

Intel on Tuesday announced the Xeon E5-2600 series chips, which succeed the Xeon 5600 chips announced in March 2010. IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Dell concurrently announced servers with Intel's new chips, and have also packed new networking and bus technologies that improve bandwidth for faster deployment of virtual machines.

Bottlenecks have been an issue in the past when deploying virtual machines, and adoption of the new PCI-Express 3.0 bus and 10-gigabit Ethernet at the motherboard level will improve throughput for servers to loop data quicker, analysts said. Server customers will also be able to deploy more virtual machines per server, which could allow industry standard x86 servers to take on demanding workloads such as analytics and databases.

The E5 chips include up to eight cores and boast a significant improvement in performance, which could be the biggest driver for server upgrades, said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT. The E5-2600 chips are based on the Sandy Bridge microarchitecture. and deliver up to 80 percent faster processing compared to the Xeon 5600 chips.

The chips are also more power efficient, which could help companies curb power costs while consolidating x86 servers in data centers, King said. The hardware utilization rates will also improve with sensor technologies and system management tools that diagnose problems to keep servers running at peak efficiency.

The new servers will also support more memory -- up to 768GB in 24 slots -- which provide more DRAM for software applications and virtual machines to work with, said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight 64. A larger memory pool is key to allowing heavier workloads such as databases to run on virtual machines.

IBM claimed its new two-socket BladeCenter HS23 server delivers 62 percent more computing power, and runs 20 percent more virtual machines than its predecessor BladeCenter HS22. The blade server will support up to four times more memory than HS22.

Beyond the processor, IBM looked at data center elements including memory, software, storage, networking and chassis when building the HS23, said Adalio Sanchez, general manager of IBM's System x business. The HS23 blade is designed for virtualization and cloud deployments, or even database and ERP (enterprise resource planning) installations.

"It's not about the processor anymore," Sanchez said, adding that deployments are about optimizing workloads for better performance, economics and efficiency.

The improved I/O inside servers will partly come from support for PCI-Express 3.0, which is the successor to the PCI data transfer protocols to shuttle data between components and devices, said Insight 64's Brookwood. PCIe 3.0 can move data at 8 gigatransfers per second, which is an improvement over its predecessor PCI-Express 2.0, which had a speed of 5 gigatransfers per second.

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