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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Between souping up its x86 and Sparc lines and adding a new cooling system with the latest Xeon processors to its rack and tower servers, 2004 has been busy year for Fujitsu Computer Systems. Will 2005 be the year it leaps from the Other category into the Top Five?

"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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