In a move which industry watchers predict will "stir up" the high-end computing market, IBM today introduced three servers based on its latest Power5 processor architecture: the eServer i5 595, p5 595 and p5 590.

According to Tony Lock, chief analyst at Bloor Research, IBM has priced the devices aggressively. "These servers bring the prices right down," he said.

"They will definitely stir up the field and it will be very interesting to see how the usual suspects - HP and Sun - will react as IBM has laid down the gauntlet in terms of price/performance."

Designed for datacentre consolidation and large enterprise clients, the IBM eServer p5 590 and 595 systems are designed to consolidate existing Unix and Linux servers.

Big Blue claims that the systems provide the ability to run over 250 virtual servers on a single machine, reducing costs by allowing clients to consolidate entire datacentres onto single servers.

"These are seriously powerful boxes," Lock told vnunet.com. "The new P5 chip is certainly a big step forward and IBM has wrapped some good software around the offerings, including an updated version of AIX and some nice management tools."

The eServer p5 590 is available at 1.65GHz and can scale to 32 processors.

The flagship p5 595 is available with either 1.65GHz or 1.9GHz processors and can scale to a 64-way system. Compatible with existing Power4 processor-based servers, the systems support AIX 5L Version 5.2 and 5.

The 32-processor "solution-oriented" eServer i5 595, originally launched in May, is based on the same hardware.

It is designed to run on-demand computing environments with IBM i5/OS, IBM AIX 5L, Linux and Microsoft Windows (via an integrated xSeries adapter or integrated xSeries server).

The eServer i5 595 and eServer p5 595 represent the flagship implementations of IBM's Power5 server product line and IBM Virtualization Engine technologies, the company said.

"With the introduction of these new eServer p5 systems, we are providing record breaking performance and giving clients the means to consolidate large Sun and HP server workloads," said Adalio Sanchez, general manager for IBM eServer pSeries.

"The leadership price/performance gap we have enjoyed for nearly three years has just widened to a chasm."