Fujitsu updates blades

Fujitsu Computer Systems charged into the compact server market with a refresh of its blade servers last week.

The Primergy BX300 blade now uses the Intel Pentium M processor and has as much as 4G bytes of memory. It is designed for transaction-intensive applications such as large Web server farms or network caching.

The BX300 blade fits in a 3U chassis, which holds 20 compact blades. An optional PCI slot in the chassis holds Gigabit Ethernet or Fibre Channel connections for integration with network-attached storage or Fibre Channel-based storage-area networks.

The use of the Pentium M processor instead of a Low Voltage Pentium III allows Fujitsu to double the memory of each BX300 blade to 4G bytes, thus increasing performance. The processor also has a larger Level 2 cache than the previous Pentium III processor. Each blade runs at 1.4 GHz to 1.6 GHz.

Alternatively, the BX300 blade can be configured with two Low Voltage Pentium III processors. Each blade can also be configured with 20G-byte or 60G-byte Integrated Device Electronics (IDE) drives. The blades run Linux or Microsoft Windows Server 2003.

The chassis has redundant and hot-pluggable power supplies and fans for fault tolerance. A keyboard-video-mouse switch is available for remote access, and a dual hot-pluggable Gigabit Ethernet switch blade provides multiple connections to a network.

Network administrators can remotely manage the Primergy BX300 blades via hot-pluggable and redundant management blades. Software is also included that allows the provisioning and configuration of the server blades.

Fujitsu has three software packages for managing its servers: ServerStart, to install and remotely configure blades; ServerView, which secures server availability and simplifies server administration; and RemoteDeploy, which is integrated in ServerView’s user interface and provides an overview of deployed server blades.

Pricing starts at $6,500 for the Primergy BX300 blade server. It is available now.