For IBM, it’s go big or go home. In the past year alone, the technology giant injected $1 billion into flash research, committed another billion to promote application development on its Power servers and carved out Watson as a dedicated unit tasked with applying natural language processing in analytics. The division is starting off with – surprise, surprise – $1 billion behind it.

Now Big Blue is putting it all together with the sixth-generation of its x86 enterprise systems. Based on the newly unveiled X6 architecture, the line is designed for mission-critical cloud and Big Data workloads that require continuous availability and need to be able to scale effectively.

“Our enterprise X-Architecture for x86-based servers and solutions delivers high performance and the highest customer satisfaction in the industry, making us number one in high-end x86 systems,” boasted Adalio Sanchez, the general manager of IBM’s x86 and PureSystems Solutions business. “We continue to innovate and deliver leadership performance, reliability and investment protection for mission-critical workloads with X6.”

X6 introduces a number of major improvements, most notably the addition of integrated eXFlash that provides up to 12.8 terabytes of NAND capacity on the memory bus. The proximity of the storage to the processor greatly increases application performance while reducing latency, and has added benefit of eliminating the need for external SANs or NAS, IBM said. Besides being faster, the architecture is also modular, supporting multiple generations of CPUs and other components through automatic configuration. This feature extends replacement cycles and reduces acquisition costs by as much as 28 percent, according to the company. To further increase system longevity, the X6 includes self-healing capabilities and uses analytics to proactively identify potential failures.

The architecture powers the four-socket x3850 X6, eight-socket System x3950 X6 and Flex System x880 series machines, as well as a new two-socket rack server that supports up to 14 drives for a total of 56 terabytes. New to the IBM portfolio is the FlashSystem 840, which sports nearly double the IOPS of its predecessor to better accommodate virtualized and analytical applications. It’s available with Enterprise Performance Solution, a repackaged version of Big Blue’s SVC storage virtualization platform that adds essential data management functionality like snapshotting and compression.