News
NEC Pushes Stratus FT Technology into Biometrics
- By Scott Bekker
- 03/21/2002
Cue the Mission Impossible theme music.
NEC Computers thinks it's identified a niche for its fault-tolerant Windows servers in government agencies looking for biometric security solutions.
NEC announced its new network security solution, NEC Fault Tolerant Biometric at the FOSE2002 government IT show this week.
“As the need for security systems increases, so does the dependency on continuous operation and authentication availability," says Kozo Yoshimatsu, vice president and general manager of Enterprise Server Products for NEC.
The servers are based on technology NEC Computers licenses from Stratus Technologies Inc. They run Windows 2000 Server and include redundant processors and memory modules that conduct transactions in parallel so that a hardware failure doesn't shut down the system.
NEC says it is drawing on its experience developing biometric security for the FBI and Interpol agencies and combining that with its fault-tolerant servers.
"This is the perfect marriage of those two histories," Yoshimatsu says.
The system is designed to achieve biometric authentication through finger image scanning.
NEC is hoping the ability of the systems to run any standard Windows 2000-compatible application on top of the fingerprint scanning application will make the systems appealing.
NEC is positioning the servers as solutions for all levels of government. Systems start at $18,000. NEC charges $200 per user for its Enhanced Touchpass biometric security systems.
About the Author
Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.