Features - Storage Innovations:

NEC LAUNCHES INTEL ITANIUM 2 PROCESSOR-BASED BLADE SERVER

NEC Solutions (America) Inc introduced the industry's first Intel Itanium 2 processor-based blade server offered by a major enterprise hardware manufacturer. The Express5800/1020Ba Blade server offers 64-bit computing power, 4x InfiniBand capabilities and unprecedented memory capacity, designed for organizations running multi-thread processor intensive applications.

Designed to meet the needs of Fortune 1000 enterprises, research institutions and universities, the Express5800/1020Ba Blade server is ideal for running high performance analytical applications such as genome mapping, weapons research and financial market simulation, all of which are functions that demand significant processor power.

"We are excited that NEC is the first major system manufacturer to launch a blade server based on the Itanium 2 processor," said Richard Dracott, general manager of Enterprise Marketing and Planning at Intel. "This is another indicator that price/performance advantages of the Intel architecture are in demand. The new platform will give customers more options to meet their business needs."

John Hallquist, president at Livermore Software Technology Corp, an independent software vendor (ISV), is partnering with NEC to develop customized crash test simulation solutions for the automotive industry.

"Customers using our proprietary simulation software require a massive degree of computing power and large amounts of scalable memory," said Hallquist. "Partnering with NEC enables us to provide organizations with the ideal computing environment -- one designed to evolve with technological advances, scale an organization's changing computing needs, and proves itself to be an innovative, yet viable long-term investment."

Pharmaceutical corporations can take advantage of the Itanium 2 processor and 4x InfiniBand capabilities of the Express5800/1020Ba Blade server to help predict molecular properties in new drugs or running 3D simulation structural models of potential new drugs, saving time and money in the research lab. Automotive manufacturers running crash test simulation analysis can help save fleets of real cars by crash testing car designs against a virtual concrete wall. Furthermore, investment banks that predict market performance are able to build complex market simulations and simultaneously run custom financial performance applications to improve portfolio management, while increasing investor profits.

Larry Sheffield, senior vice president of the Solutions Platform Group believes by NEC offering the industry's first Itanium 2 processor-based blade server the competition will sit up and take notice.

"By launching the only Itanium 2 processor-based blade server with InfiniBand 4x technology, we are providing our customers with the hottest technology available in high-powered low-density blade servers," said Sheffield. "Enterprise and research organizations are constantly looking for technology solutions that are both innovative and efficient and this new blade server will help them cut operational costs and save resources that can have a positive impact on their bottom line and resource allocation."

Features/Benefits

The NEC Express5800/1020Ba blade server interfaces with external devices via its 4x InfiniBand PCI-X host adapter, offering 1GB per second throughput and delivering up to eight simultaneous communications paths over a single cable. To offer businesses the most processing power per rack space unit, each Express5800/1020Ba blade server comes standard with two Itanium 2 processors, allowing each 1.6GHz processor blade to deliver 12.8 GFLOPS performance, with nine blades fitting into a single 10U chassis, providing up to 18 processors per chassis, making it possible to implement a system that will deliver over 345 GFLOPS of processing power per cabinet.

The blades are fast and easy to deploy, with hot-swappable capabilities, making implementation efficient, and allowing for uninterrupted operation when adding, moving or replacing blades.

Additional product features include:

• 24GB of expandable memory provide companies valuable long term protection of IT investment.
• Automatic fail-over with redundant switches provides uninterrupted availability.
• Two on-board 73GB U320 SCSI hard drives and built-in I/O -- two Gb Ethernet ports, USB, and video.
• Built-in management interface providing centralized system management of all blades in the chassis, as well as other blades connected over IP.
• Enhanced blade server design consolidates cables, power supplies, storage and network switching onto a single chassis.
• Simplified set-up and maintenance with shared keyboard/mouse/video interface.

The Express5800/1020Ba Blade server is designed to operate most efficiently in Linux clusters, administered as a single system. Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS is also available, providing a solid platform that is far more straightforward to deploy and administer than other clusters.