The IBM® System x3550 M3 builds on the latest Intel Xeon processor technology with extreme processing power and superior energy-management and cooling features. With twice the performance of previous generations and a flexible, energy-smart design that integrates low-wattage components, the x3550 M3 can help you meet demanding workloads at a lower cost per watt.

Suggested uses: customers requiring a highly available, energy-efficient, rack-optimized solution for physical and virtual intensive commercial environments like eBusiness/eCommerce, collaboration, virtualization, database, and enterprise resource planning applications.

The x3550 M3 offers numerous features to boost performance and reduce costs:
- Up to two 6-core Xeon 5600 series processors offering superior performance. Xeon 5600 series processors offer up to 54% better performance than the previous generation 5500 series processors (workload dependent).
- Eighteen DIMMs of registered 1333 MHz DDR3 ECC memory provide speed, high availability, and a memory capacity of up to 288 GB.
- High-performance 6 Gbps SAS RAID controllers and 15K RPM 6 Gbps SAS disk drives in a variety of capacities to suit your local storage requirements.
- 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 20,000 I/O operations per second (IOPS) whereas a typical HDD handles fewer than 500 IOPS.