IBM Global Financing is helping new and existing IBM Systems x customers step up to the new X5 technology.

The lending and leasing arm of IBM is making this easy with flexible financing offerings that include the upgrade, take-out and disposal of existing leased and owned servers regardless of manufacturer.

In a related development coinciding with the launch of eX5, IBM’s Global Technology Services announced a new approach to delivering implementation services for server and storage products.

Among the new offerings IBM is introducing are: IBM Implementation Services for System x BladeCenter or System x remote implementation and IBM Implementation Services for System x Remote ServicePac for IBM Systems Director.

“IBM is refreshing all its products in support of its Smart Planet initiative or dynamic infrastructure strategy,” said Erwin Chuaunsu, Country Manager, Systems & Technology Group, IBM Philippines.

For her part, Marie Christine Llanto, Manager, Systems x, IBM Philippines, added “The world is be smarter more instrumented, interconnected and intelligent…The next generation x86 architecture must be able to keep up with the proliferation of workloads and explosion of data.”

In a press briefing, Jimmy Teo Chin Fook, Senior IT Specialist, ATS System x, BladeCenter and iDataPlex, IBM STG ASEAN, gave a historical account that led to all-new class of flexible x86 systems breaking the constraints of the 30-year technology design.

IBM’s new eX5 servers, he reported, are the results of a three-year engineering effort to improve the economics of operating enterprise-sized, x86-based systems.

Drawing on decades of experience in enterprise systems design and silicon packaging, IBM engineers have radically expanded the capabilities of the x86 platform by achieving an engineering first decoupling memory from its traditional, tightly bound place alongside the server’s processor, thereby eliminating the need to buy another server to support growing memory-intensive workloads.

He explained that this all-new class of x86-based system offers six time the memory scalability available today, thus helping flatten the ever-rising cost of operating industry-standard data centers.

The eX5 systems take advantage of integration with IBM middleware to create a highly virtualized environment that gives users a flexible, highly scalable system that can reduce the number of servers needed by half while cutting storage costs 97 percent and licensing fee by 50 percent.

IBM will introduce three new, ultra-scalable eX5 systems throughout 2010 the four-processor IBM System x3850 X5, the BladeCenter HX5 and the System x3690 X5, an entry-priced server capable of enterprise-class operation that will become the most powerful two-processer server in the market, an IBM news release said.