In an attempt to grab a larger slice of the server market pie, Fujitsu Technology Solutions (FTS) Friday unleashed an upgraded PRIMEPOWER Unix server, capable of supporting two to 16 central processing units (CPUs).
In an attempt to grab a larger slice of the server market pie, Fujitsu Technology Solutions (FTS) Friday unleashed an upgraded PRIMEPOWER Unix server, capable of supporting two to 16 CPUs.
The PRIMEPOWER 800 is an addition to the line of Solaris, SPARC-compliant
servers to be shipped to the North American market by the Sunnyvale,
Calif.-based FTS.
The product launch opens up competition in a marketplace that has been
dominated by Sun Microsystems Inc., Hewlett Packard and IBM.
“Competition is good since
customers always come out ahead when they have more vendor choices,” said
Vernon Turner, vice president of global enterprise server solutions at
International Data Corp., a provider of analysis on the IT market. “Not only
does it speed technology innovation, it raises the bar in overall areas of
service and customer relationships.”
In addition to adding a new name to the server mix, the SPARC-compliant
product expands Sun’s Solaris marketplace. The servers feature a system bus
with crossbar switch technology adapted from Fujitsu’s mainframe design.
Their maximum data transfer rate is 51.2 gigabytes per second.
Dually, the new Unix product fills a gap in the server marketplace,
according to Tom Donnelly, manager of PRIMEPOWER marketing.
“Our focus is on
the mid-range customer,” Donnelly said. “Model 800 is unique for its size in that
customers can run applications separately in partitions. One partition does
not affect the other. This way, two or three departments can run on one box,
which cuts administrative costs.
“The product also has failover clustering software, the ability to access
12,000 applications and, like our Model 1000 and 2000 products, an increased
processing speed of 560 MHz, which is 1.25 times faster than the 450
MHz-powered models,” Donnelly said. “These enhancements provide additional
advantage for memory-intensive applications, such as data warehousing,
enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management.”
The FTS systems aim to offer an entire spectrum of enterprise
requirements — from the smallest work-group server with one processor to
the highest-capacity enterprise Unix server in the marketplace, according to
Donnelly. The company’s product line consists of Unix servers running Sun
SPARC64 processors, Intel-based servers, advanced storage systems and
systems for delivering streaming media content over the Internet.