Hardware Today: Fujitsu Server Snapshot

No doubt about it, 2004 has been a busy year for Fujitsu Computer Systems. In addition to expanding the range of its Primepower and Primergy product lines, the vendor added a series of blades to the Primergy line. It also recently added a new cooling system and the latest Xeon processors to its rack and tower servers. These changes to the Primergy line are a case of technology bleeding down from its higher-end Primepower market.

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"We've noticed a trend over the past year of more and more users utilizing our Primergy servers for mission-critical applications," said Richard McCormack, vice president of product and solution marketing at Fujitsu. "Primepower has been designed as a high reliability system, so we are now transferring that knowledge into the lower end of the market."

The following chart shows Fujitsu's server offerings at a glance. As usual, new additions are noted in bold; newly retired servers appear in italics.

Server Line	Description	Processor Types	Processor Range	Operating Systems	Servers	Pricing
Primergy1	Fujitsu's Intel-based rack, tower, and blade servers are mainly built on Xeon technology and typically in the 1 to 16 processor range. Although strong on a worldwide basis, they are not as strong in the United States as Fujitsu's SPARC-based Primepower line.	Low voltage. Pentium III, Celeron, Pentium M, Pentium 4, Xeon DP, Xeon MP, Itanium-2	1 Pentium III, Pentium M, Celeron, or Pentium 4, 1 to 2 Xeon DP, 4 to 16 Xeon MP, 1 to 4 Itanium-2	Windows, SUSE Linux, Red Hat Linux	Rack (RX) RX100, RX200, RX300, RX600, RX800, RXI300, RXI600	From $1,000 (for the RX100) to $245,000 (for the RX800)
					Tower (TX) TX150, TX200, TX300, TX600
					Blade BX300, BX600,
Primepower	Fujitsu's SPARC Solaris servers are based on Fujitsu's SPARC 64 V error correcting chipsets. They are architected for mission-critical applications2. Many of the Workgroup and Midrange SPARC servers are rack friendly; all allow the usual pedestal/floormount.	SPARC64 V	1 to 128 V	Solaris	Workgroup 200, 250, 400, 450	$6,400 (for the 250) to more than $1 million (for any of the Enterprise systems)
					Midrange 650, 800, 850,
					Enterprise 900, 1000, 1500, 2000, 2500

¹When comparing offerings within the line, note that servers with the same numbers in different categories have similar architectures.
²The more challenging the mission for which the server is intended, the higher the model number (and price tag).

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