News
NEC Updates Fault-Tolerant Server Line
- By Scott Bekker
- 04/10/2002
NEW ORLEANS -- NEC Solutions Inc., which sells fault-tolerant Intel-based servers built on technology licensed from Stratus Technologies, introduced its second generation of systems this week at Microsoft TechEd.
NEC's new servers are called the NEC Express5800/320La Enhanced, a tower system, and the NEC Express5800/320Lr Enhanced, a rack-mounted server. They cost $27,000 and $27,400, respectively, when configured with Windows 2000 Advanced Server, 512 MB of RAM and 73 GB of disk.
Improvements over the first generation of NEC fault-tolerant servers are copper and fiber Gigabit Ethernet, 73 GB of internal storage and an option to upgrade to 1-GHz Intel processors when available. Both systems are dual-processor capable.
Fault-tolerant systems differ from clusters of Windows servers because they use redundant hardware acting in lockstep to carry through applications and individual transactions in spite of hardware failures.
Customer choice for fault-tolerant systems blossomed after the release of Windows 2000. Marathon Technologies was the sole provider of fault-tolerant systems in the Windows NT timeframe, but Stratus delivered an alternate approach to fault-tolerant computing after Windows 2000 shipped.
NEC entered a reseller agreement with Stratus to use its technology with NEC's own server technology. NEC Solutions parent company, NEC Corp., is the fifth largest server manufacturer in the world.
About the Author
Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.