Fujitsu Technology Solutions Inc., looking to push its way into the U.S. server space, has begun shipping the fifth generation of its Solaris-compatible PrimePower high-end servers and is laying out an aggressive roadmap for its SPARC64 chip technology.
The Sunnyvale, Calif., company—a member of Fujitsu Ltd.s group of businesses—on Wednesday said it has started shipping the PrimePower 900, 1500 and 2500 servers.
The 900 is a 16-way server, while the 1500 is a 32-way, said Richard McCormack, vice president of product marketing at Fujitsu Technology Solutions. The 2500 is a 128-way system.
All run Sun Microsystems Inc.s Solaris operating system and are powered by Fujitsus proprietary Unix-based SPARC64 chips, McCormack said. They all offer the companys X-Par partitioning technology, hot-plug capabilities and automatic instruction re-try.
McCormack said the servers are targeted at companies that need power systems for their mission-critical back-end applications—traditional ones such as databases, customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning applications, or ones that are growing in importance, such as e-mail—or for businesses looking to consolidate their servers.
The company also is laying out its roadmap for the SPARC64 chip technology, which is completely compatible with Suns SPARC architecture, McCormack said.
Currently Fujitsus chip runs at 1.35GHz. The company will introduce a 1.62GHz chip by the end of the year, and a 2.4GHz chip in early 2004, all built using the .13-micron process.
Also in 2004, Fujitsu will introduce a 2.4GHz SPARC64 chip with 4MB of Level 2 cache built using the .09-micron process. Fujitsu also will launch chips with dual-core processing capabilities, essentially putting two chips on one silicon.
In 2005, the company will up the speed to 3GHz, McCormack said, followed by a 5GHz chip in 2006 and a 6GHz chip in 2007. Also by 2006, Fujitsu will introduce a chip with four-core processing capabilities, McCormack said.
The roadmap comes less than two months after Fujitsu, a longtime Sun ally, announced an agreement with Intel Corp. to build high-end 32-bit Xeon-based systems by the end of next year, and 64-bit Itanium-based systems in 2005, including servers that will scale up to 128 processors.
Fujitsu already has a suite of Intel-based servers, the Primergy line.
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