Last week IBM announced a new member of its eServer xSeries family based on Intel's 64bit Itanium 2 chip - the 16-processor x455, big brother to the four-processor x450.

Using IBM's Enterprise X-Architecture (EXA) the x455 can scale from four processors up to 16, in blocks comprising four processors, I/O expansion and up to 56GB of memory.

IBM said the servers are aimed at transaction-intensive databases and large enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, and support Enterprise and Datacenter 64bit editions of Microsoft Windows Server 2003, and 64bit Linux Enterprise operating systems.

The x455 will be available on 9 December with Itanium 2 processors clocked at speeds of 1.3GHz, 1.4GHz or 1.5GHz and able to address a maximum of 224GB of RAM if 16 processors are installed. "Users can choose to have one or two processors initially for development or proof-of-concept testing before upgrading and rolling out their large database applications," said Steve Edwards, IBM xSeries product manager.

Gary Barnett of analyst company Ovum commented, "Further IBM support for Intel's Itanium is a powerful boost for the processor."

Apart from a different memory controller, the x455 has the same features as IBM's 32bit Xeon MP-based systems. "This allowed us to put features into the 32bit servers which customers would be familiar with when they needed to upgrade to 64bit hardware," said Edwards.

Pricing for the x455 starts at £12,500 + VAT for a two-processor model, rising to £50,000 + VAT for a 16-processor version.