I was daydreaming about re-purposing a current IBM tower (X, Power6 etc) for personal computing, and remembered Lenovo has their ThinkServer line of towers and rack-mountables. So, are they an ODM for IBM anymore, or is it someone else making the IBM models? If another, who?

By the way, daydreaming is probably an understatement...hallucinating is probably more accurate once I saw how much a basic tower runs for.

AFAIK....Most all hardware is 'assambled by Lenovo" ...... except that our IBM ACC REP >quote...'few select ones that are in transations stage' .....AND he ddint know what/when/where that ' stage' are/were ,,, etc

Welcome to 'post IBM' mfg'ing pricing' .....and thus we are looking at NON-Lenovo based hardware at the moment. Gone are good OL'days of super reliable hardware shipped from Roch'.........We'ch etc

Good thing we never left UNIX/LINUX based OS.....

Odd...I just saw an image of a Lenovo TD series tower, and it had some of the same IBM branded guts as an IBM Power6 case. What does this mean?

That, just like in the "good OL'days of super reliable hardware shipped from Roch'", IBM works closely with a number of manufacturers (such as Lenovo) to design and assemble their systems?

hiya Rob !

you got your Newer T60 LINUX machine ? no?
T60 = one reliable 'platform' truely DESIGNED for MULTI-OS Operations.... and wont be 'beat' anytime soon I guess !

Nope, still trying to sort out a suitable T60.

And I don't think the T60 is any more suited for Linux than other T-series... Most ThinkPads run pretty much flawlessly under Linux with the exception of the L/SL/Edge series.

Well, if Lenovo is still an ODM on the current IBM systems, it seems odd to see IBM-branded components in Lenovo-branded servers, when you'd expect the opposite.

You're right, that is a bit odd. Still, given the close working relationship between the two (yes, even to this day), I'm nowhere near as surprised as if, say, some Dell-branded parts made their way into a Lenovo box.

the definition of ODM is that they both design and build the machines, Lenovo by that nature can't be ODM since most of the manufacturing are outsourced to contract manufacturer like Foxconn, Quanta, etc. If Lenovo is not building their own Thinkpads and ideapads, there is little likelihood that they are constructing the desktop machines in their own manufacturing plants, as the technology used for desktop manufacturing is pretty low tech (people could do it relatively easy with off shelf parts).

Gidday Lead* ..
so what WOULD YOU call 'apple'? > since they havent really mfg;d from ageeeeees ,,,,,?
lol lol ,,,,, not sure any of OEM are true mfg'rs of their OWN HARDWARE/Software these days ,,,,,