* Fujitsu’s latest is packed with Itanium 2 processors
Fujitsu last week rolled out a massive Itanium 2 server that rivals those from HP and SGI.
The PrimeQuest server, which runs Windows Server 2003, Red Hat Linux or SuSE Linux Enterprise Server, is designed for data center-class applications and high availability. It uses as many as 32 Itanium 2 processors and is expected to host large databases and online transaction processing environments.
The server has the ability to be divided into as many as eight hardware partitions. The chipset in the server enables two technologies: System Mirror and Flexible I/O. In System Mirror, memory and crossbar switch interconnects operate synchronously to isolate errors and reduce downtime. FIO redirects I/O resources to specific processing requests to avoid disruption of operations.
Fujitsu also offers PrimeQuest servers based on the Sparc64 chipset, which runs Sun’s Solaris operating system.
The server is available in two models – the 480 and the 440.
The floor-standing 480 supports up to 32 processors, 512G bytes of memory and up to 32 hard drives for a maximum internal capacity of 4.7T bytes. It has 32 Gigabit Ethernet ports, 16 SCSI ports and 128 PCI ports.
The floor-standing 440 supports up to 16 processors, 246G bytes of memory and a maximum of 2.6T bytes of internal disk capacity. Like the 480, it has 32 Gigabit Ethernet ports, 16 SCSI ports and 128 PCI ports.
Both operate at clock speeds of 1.5 GHz or 1.6 GHz.
HP by contrast has its Integrity rx8620-32 Server, with up to 32 processors, and rx7620-16 Server, with up to 16 processors, which each run at 1.3 GHz and 1.5 GHz. Both have partitioning capability. Each not only runs Linux and Windows, but also runs HP-UX and OpenVMS. They are both rack-mountable units.
SGI also recently introduced the Altix 3000 family of servers. The Altix 3700 Bx2, which uses 1.6-GHz Itanium 2 processors, is the largest SGI Itanium to date. It can be configured with as many as 256 Itanium 2 processors in a single node. The Altix 3700 runs Linux only.
Pricing was not immediately available.
