* Start-up Frabric7 unveils two servers
Start-up, Fabric7 last week unveiled its first server products. The company was founded in May 2002 by Sharad Mehrotra, former CEO of router vendor Procket Networks, which was acquired by Cisco. Mehrotra says Fabric7 is taking on system vendors HP, IBM and Sun in the server world. Fabric7’s two servers, the Q160 and Q80, use AMD Opteron processors and proprietary switching technology to interconnect the processors and give them the performance of Unix systems.
Fabric7’s servers could be linked together to perform network operations or provide connections to the storage-area network. Their function could change instantly as its processing power are needed elsewhere.
The servers can be hardware partitioned and run as symmetric multiprocessing boxes. They run Linux or Windows operating systems. Ethernet and Fibre Channel interfaces can be provisioned for each server and load-balancing, SSL and XML offload can be assigned to each machine. Each server ships with a graphical user interface or command line interface for provisioning, deploying and scaling the servers.
The Q160 is designed for business-critical applications and features as many as 14 AMD Opteron processors and up to 176G bytes of memory. As many as 112 I/O interfaces to the network or storage can be configured.
The server has redundant active-passive system management, dual-redundant power supplies and cooling, front-to-back airflow, hot plug and controlled hot removal of modules.
The Fabric7 Q80 has as many as eight AMD Opteron processors and as much as 128G bytes of memory. It is designed as an application server and can be partitioned into as many as four separate machines. It has eight 133-MHz PCI-X slots and eight built-in Gigabit Ethernet ports.
The server features dual-redundant, hot-swappable power and cooling.
The Fabric7 Q160 is available now starting at $144,000; the Fabric7 Q80 server is expected to be available in January starting at $42,000.
Fabric7 is funded for $32 million by New Enterprise Associates, Goldman Sachs, Sanmina-SCI (the same company that picked up AMD server vendor Newisys two years ago), Selby Venture Partners, Vanguard Venture Partners and Yasuda Enterprise Development.
