"This is something I haven't seen from anybody else in the market," he said. "Here's the deal. When you're putting together a data center, just like when you're putting together anything else, really all you know is what the maximum wattage is that something is going to draw. ...Over time it's going to tell you the actual wattage and you'll be able to, down the road, manage to the amount of energy you want to spend on a particular task ' that's a pretty cool thing. This is something that competitors and other companies and even server groups within IBM are going to need to respond to and build that type of capability into their systems."

Mitch Rosen, chief technology officer at the University of Virginia's School of Engineering and Applied Science, said the university has deployed IBM System x two-way rack servers in a Linux cluster to support its computer- and data-intensive biomedical engineering research. Having the new server family was essential for the school.

As for PowerExecutive, Rosen said: "It's not out yet, but I can speak to it this way: Because I'm in a historical landmark situation, floor space is very expensive. So ... providing cooling in Thomas Jefferson's university here, having a high-compute capability and being able to manage some of the power and cooling costs is just in the sweet spot of what we need."

IBM's new System x servers and workstations include the:

-- System x3650, a business-critical application server for workload consolidation that starts at US$2,049.