Excellence Awards 6 Winners, Finalists Show Innovation Up and Down IT Stack

WINNER

Fujitsu Computer Systems

PrimeQuest 480

With IT managers focused on getting as much processing power out of their hardware as they can while keeping management and power consumption costs down, Fujitsu Computer Systems PrimeQuest 480 is very appealing. The server impressed the Excellence Awards judges by tackling these issues in an innovative way.

The PrimeQuest 480 supports as many as 32 Intel Itanium 2 processors in a compact chassis that hosts up to 1TB of memory.

"Fujitsus PrimeQuest 480 is truly scalable and capable," said Erich Berman, a Corporate Partner judge in this category and advanced technology consultant at Northwestern Mutual, in Milwaukee.

PrimeQuest 480s partitioning—which enables up to eight isolated partitions, with each running a separate operating system instance and software stack—really made the server stand out from the competition in this category. The judges also liked that the server offers multiple options for mirroring critical components to ensure continued operation in the event of hardware failures.

FINALISTS

Sun Microsystems

Sun Fire X4100 and X4200

The Sun Fire X4100 and X4200 servers were designed by Sun Microsystems founder, Andy Bechtolsheim, and theyre the first servers in Suns new xSeries x86 server line, code-named Galaxy. The judges liked that the dual-core-capable servers deliver reliably in compute-intensive environments and that they are well-suited for memory-intensive applications and workloads.

Tripp Lite

SmartOnline UPS systems

While theyre not servers themselves, Tripp Lites SmartOnline hot-swappable and high-power-density uninterruptible power supply systems ensure that data center servers stay up and running. Judge Berman said it best: "Interesting. A simple and practical solution." With no tolerance for downtime, enterprises can rely on the SmartOnline UPS systems to ensure the availability of mission-critical equipment. The Excellence Awards judges in this category also liked that these UPS systems allow IT managers to have power completely replaced without disconnecting equipment.

—Anne Chen