IBM Fusion HCI System Levels Up


IBM Fusion HCI System has "leveled up" over the past several months bringing powerful new hardware capabilities to the platform as well as more choice and flexibility in how the system can be configured to meet application needs.

The primary building blocks of a Fusion HCI System are the servers that provide storage and compute resources and these are now more powerful.  Both the 32-core and 64-core servers now come with Intel Xeon 4 "Sapphire Rapids" processors and high-speed DDR5 RAM.  The 32-core servers come standard with 256GB of RAM that can be optionally doubled to 512GB RAM.  The 64-core servers come standard with 1024GB RAM which can also be doubled to give 2048GB of RAM -- that's 32 GB of RAM per core!

The performance and choice of Fusion HCI storage options have also leveled up.  New Samsung PM1743 PCIe Gen 5 NVMe drives are now used to create the storage cluster, giving a performance boost over the previous Gen 4 drives.  And now both 3.84TB and 7.68TB capacity NVMe drives are available to make it easier to match the size of the storage cluster to application requirements.

New NVIDIA Ethernet switches, the SN2201 for the management network and the 200GbE SN3700V for high-speed data traffic, are now standard.  As before, these switches are installed in pairs to provide redundancy for keeping network connections up during rolling upgrades or in the case of a failure.

And, of course, AI applications have not been forgotten!  GPU options have been expanded to include the NVIDIA H100 NVL that has 94 GB of RAM and the ability to linked in pairs to create an even larger GPU with 188 GB of RAM for handling very large foundation models.  Each Fusion HCI GPU server can have 8 of the NVIDIA H100 NVL GPUs, and each Fusion HCI rack can have 4 GPU servers.  That's 32 H100 NVL GPUs in a single rack, or nearly 100 of them in a three rack cluster!

With all this new power and flexibility, there's never been a better time to deploy Fusion HCI System!

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