Fujitsu cools things down with new PRIMERGY BX900 blade
Watch out Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM. Fujitsu wants to eat some of your market share with a new blade server in its PRIMERGY line that consumes 30 percent less power than its previous models.
The PRIMERGY BX900 blade server is built on the Intel Xeon 5500 processor series, and it comes with the Fujitsu ServerView Resource Coordinator VE. In plainer English, ServerView is Fujitsu’s virtualization-management software, which is designed to orchestrate information not just from Fujitsu’s hardware but also physical and virtual technology from its competitors.
Richard McCormack, senior vice president of the server and solutions business for Fujitsu America, says the company hopes to use this product line to help double its unit marketshare in servers between now and 2010, when it hopes to ship 500,000 units. Currently, Fujitsu is the fourth largest supplier of x86 servers, according to McCormack.
The PRIMERGY BX900 is internally designated as one of Fujitsu’s “super green” products. That means the Fujitsu product design and development teams feel the technology has “significantly exceeded” environmental considerations typically associated with its class of product.
In the case of the PRIMERGY BX900, McCormack says the server can help reduce energy costs by thousands of dollars per chassis each year. Its design includes Fujitsu’s Cool-safe chassis, which monitors and adjusts air intake, fans and so forth, so that the blades can operate in their most energy-efficient state.
Other features highlighted in the new server line include dynamic virtualization (which means companies can automate provisioning of physical and virtual servers), dynamic high availability (every active component is hot-swappable) and dynamic scalability (which means the company can fit two more blades in its 10U chassis than any other vendor, up to 18 blades).
Pricing for the PRIMERGY BX900 starts at $10,791; the products are supposed to be available immediately.