NEC bulks up high-end servers

NEC Solutions announced two servers last week aimed at call centers or financial companies that can't afford to have a server crash.

NEC is developing a large server based on Intel's Itanium 2 processor and a fault tolerant server that runs the Linux operating system. The company - a division of Japan's NEC that serves North America - showed a demonstration of its 32-processor Itanium 2 server, dubbed the Express5800/1320Xc at the Supercomputing conference last week in Baltimore. NEC has started shipping its Express5800/ft system that runs the Linux operating system and has a number of redundant components to guard against failures, the company says.

By backing Intel's new Itanium 2 chip, NEC now competes with Reduced Instruction Set Computing-based servers from Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Sun. The Express5800/ft system also competes against servers that run on Intel's lower-end Pentium and Xeon chips.

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NEC Solutions announced two servers last week aimed at call centers or financial companies that can't afford to have a server crash.

NEC is developing a large server based on Intel's Itanium 2 processor and a fault tolerant server that runs the Linux operating system. The company - a division of Japan's NEC that serves North America - showed a demonstration of its 32-processor Itanium 2 server, dubbed the Express5800/1320Xc at the Supercomputing conference last week in Baltimore. NEC has started shipping its Express5800/ft system that runs the Linux operating system and has a number of redundant components to guard against failures, the company says.

By backing Intel's new Itanium 2 chip, NEC now competes with Reduced Instruction Set Computing-based servers from Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Sun. The Express5800/ft system also competes against servers that run on Intel's lower-end Pentium and Xeon chips.

NEC will deliver the Express5800/1320Xc in December along with a 16-processor and eight-processor Itanium 2 server. Users can partition the systems to run multiple copies of both Microsoft .Net Server 2003 Datacenter Edition and Linux.

The Express5800/ft has started shipping with Pentium III chips and NEC's FT Linux operating system, starting at $27,200.

Vance is a correspondent with the IDG News Service's San Francisco bureau.

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