Primergy Servers Get New Chips

As Intel prepares to unveil “Woodcrest,” its next-generation server chip based on the company’s new Core microarchitecture, the major OEMs are all prepping systems containing the new chip.

Fujitsu is refreshing five servers in its Primergy line with Woodcrest-based systems.

Fujitsu is no exception to this, and on Tuesday, the vendor announced five new Primergy dual-socket servers: the RX200 S3 and RX300 S3 rack servers, the TX200 S3 and TX300 S3 tower servers, and the BX620 S3 blade server.

Richard McCormack, senior vice president of marketing at Fujitsu Computer Systems, describes the new servers as a refresh to the Primergy line with relatively simple changes.

The biggest change is, of course, the addition of the newest Intel processor, the Dual Core Intel Xeon 5000 and 5100 Sequence, which are designed to deliver increased performance and power efficiency.

Fujitsu also upgraded the servers’ disk and memory subsystems for increased performance.

The Primergy S3 generation of servers integrate a powerful Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) RAID controller together with hot plug SAS hard disks to deliver improved system performance, even with heavy I/O traffic. PCI-Express expansion slots provide scalability to enable customers to upgrade their systems more easily. This results in almost double the performance of the previous generation dual-core processor-based Primergy platforms.

Also new to the five S3 servers is an integrated Remote Management Controller designed to provide more powerful remote management and simplified server management.

McCormack notes that the new servers do not lock data centers into a full upgrade, which is of particular concern with regard to blades, “Primergy blade server chassis also have the ability to mix both current and future-generation Intel Xeon servers in a single environment.”

The S3 generation of Primergy servers will begin shipping in July 2006. It will be priced starting at $2,100.