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Fujitsu showcased its additions to the high-end server world today, the PrimeQuest 480 and PrimeQuest 440, built on Itanium 2 chips. The servers will be released in June with Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) Linux, but Fujitsu said it will offer a version running Novell/SuSE Linux as well as Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Windows Server 2003 Datacenter and Enterprise editions in September.
While Fujitsu aims to position itself as an alternative to IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) Unix systems, one analyst said the release may have unintended benefits for HP, which has staked its future on Itanium.
"It makes Itanium a bit more of a multi-vendor processor, which is probably a net-positive for HP," Gordon Haff, senior analyst, Illuminata, told TechNewsWorld. "HP is very much dependent on Itanium for high-end systems business. It's in their best interest to have Itanium seen as industry standard as opposed to the chip that Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) does for HP."
Highly Reliable
The PrimeQuest 440 can accommodate up to 16 processors; the 480, up to 32."Fujitsu has proven they can build high-end systems with their SPARC line [designed in an alliance with Sun]," Haff said. "It has some fairly innovative reliability features, and given Fujitsu's track record, we can take them at their word [that the features perform]."
Those features include what Fujitsu calls System Mirror, which allows the creation of a mirror processor and memory within a difference processor and memory. Doubling up means that if one fails, the system continues to run. Flexible I/O gives administrators the tools to redirect input-output resources.
Lacking Virtualization
Haff noted that the system does not offer the partitioning and virtualization options of HP's high-end Superdomes, which he called the PrimeQuest's main North American competition.
Perhaps the real question, however, is how big of a market there is for mission-critical Linux and Windows systems.
"What they're betting on is that although it may be a smaller slice of the pie, there will be enough high-margin Unix out there for them to enjoy some success," Haff said. "We've seen some growth of Windows or Linux into some larger environments. Fujitsu doesn't need to sell a large number to achieve what they would consider success."
