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NEW YORK—NEC Solutions America Inc. is preparing to roll out several new servers over the next few months as it continues to try to expand its U.S. presence.
The Sacramento, Calif., company in the third quarter will release to new systems in its fault tolerant line of servers targeted at the mid-market and high end. The new systems will build off NECs Express5800/320Lb blade server configuration, according to officials here at the CeBIT America show.
In addition, later this month, NEC will refresh its line of Intel Corp.-based high-availability servers with the new Itanium 2 6M chip—code-named Madison. The Express5800/1000 series—32-way systems that include three versions, the 1080Rc, 1160Xc and 1320Xc—will be fitted with the 1.5GHz Itanium 2 6M and 6MB of Level 3 cache, said Mike Mitsch, senior marketing director of server products.
The new systems come at a time of transition for NEC Solutions America, which this week introduced a new president and CEO. Effective next week, Toshimitsu Iwanami is replacing Norio Tanoue. Also new to the company is Larry Sheffield, a long-time IBM and SGI veteran who was recently appointed senior vice president, where he will focus on servers.
At the show, Sheffield said he expects to grow the companys U.S. server revenue from $40 million last year to $60 million this year and more than $100 million next year, numbers that he said are reachable.
“Is it really aggressive, given the size of the market, which is in the billions?” he asked. “We have $40 million, which is a very small percent. We can grow.”
NEC has worked over the past year to expand its brand recognition, and now will turn its focus into extending its partnerships with such major players as Intel and Microsoft Corp. to increase that exposure, Sheffield said.
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A key part of NECs strategy has been highlighting its fault-tolerant servers, which offer identical backup of all components, which run in lockstep. If one fails, the other picks up the work without any disruption. The Express5800/320Lb blade configuration, introduced in March, featured two 1U (1.75-inch-high) servers housing the processing power and two others holding the I/O technology. Unlike most blade servers, this system is stacked in the chassis horizontally.
In the third quarter, NEC will introduce the two-way Express5800/330Lx, which will include 2.8GHz Xeons with Intels Hyper-Threading technology, which is designed to enable a single processor to do the work of two virtual servers and improve application peformance by as much as 40 percent, according to Intel officials. NEC also will roll out the four-way 340Lx, which will come with either a 2GHz Xeon MP chip with 1MB of memory or 2.8GHz with 2MB. It also will include Hyper-Threading.
Mitsch said the company will introduce IA-64 offerings to its fault-tolerant line in 2005.
However, NEC will keep pace with Intels roadmap on its high-availability series, including Madison. The rollout will come two months after a 32-way NEC 1320Xc powered by Madison and running Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition and SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition, both for 64-bit computing, posted a record 514,034.72 transactions per minute mark on a TPC-C Benchmark, Mitsch said.