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The conga line of Intel Xeon 5600 server partners looking to the cloud continues to grow, with the addition of Fujitsu America. The Japanese systems vendor, dominant in its native land but a blip in the U.S., is rolling out new Primergy systems through its American business unit specifically targeting cloud computing environments with Intel’s new server processor.
Facing an uphill fight against titans IBM, HP and Dell, the Japanese systems vendor believes it has its own secret sauce to take on the data center and gain cloud computing market share.
The Primergy CX1000 system holds up to 38 of the 1U CX1000 rack systems in an enclosure with shared power distribution and cooling components — and with a cabinet design very different from the traditional server cabinet.
For starters, Fujitsu eliminated putting a power supply on each rack and instead put a central power supply that feeds each rack. Plus, it closed off the back of the cabinets and instead put large fans and exhaust vents on the top of the server. So instead of blowing heat out back, it blows it out of the top of the cabinet.
This eliminates the traditional “hot aisle/cold aisle” setup seen in most datacenters, since the Fujitsu cabinets can be placed back-to-back.
“What you see in our systems is because of power efficiencies, we can run at a lower power draw than the competition. We consume less power than the competition due to the way we manage air in the systems,” Jon Rodriguez, senior product manager for Primergy rack and tower servers at Fujitsu America, told InternetNews.com.
Fujitsu’s Cool-Central architecture dictates how air flows through the cabinet, as well as how they separate heat from components and where fans are placed for uniform air flow. This can make the cabinets up to 20 percent more power efficient than a comparable competitor, according to Fujitsu America.
The racks in the CX1000 are 1U only because the goal is high-density computing, Rodriguez said. The target markets for the CX1000 include cloud computing providers and hosts, companies looking to deploy their own cloud servers, Web 2.0 environments, CRM and ERP systems and high-performance computing (HPC) markets.
In addition to its power and performance story, Fujitsu America is touting the CX1000’s manageability story through its Serverview monitoring software. It alerts a manager of problems and helps keep a complete inventory of hardware.
The Serverview Resource Coordinator is a high-level configuration utility that manages resources on the server, deploys resources around the hardware and changes the resource allocation with the workload as needed.
Fujitsu’s last trick is its price. A fully loaded rack with 38 servers, one processor per socket and 16GB of memory per rack is $89,000. It goes up as CPUs, storage and memory is added. Each rack can hold up to two hard drives.
The Primergy CX1000 will be available from Fujitsu America resellers by the end of this month.
Andy Patrizio is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.
