Fujitsu re-enters SPARC market

PrimePower 800 is the new Enterprise Level SPARC server.

Very quietly, Fujitsu continues to play a large role in the corporate server space with its Primergy NT servers and Amdahl S/390 class mainframes. Now, with its PrimePower 800 series, Fujitsu is working in the high-end Sparc/Solaris space.

Under the recently launched Fujitsu Technology Solutions alliance with Sun, the two companies are expanding their competition against Compaq, HP, and IBM.

Fujitsu's latest machine, the PrimePower 800, is part of the company's Solaris SPARC-compliant server boxes. This line ranges from low-end one-processor boxes to the Model 2000, which can scale up to 128 processors.

The 800 comes with the Fujitsu's 450-MHz SPARC64-GP processor-this 64-bit CPU is certified by the SPARC International Consortium to be equivalent to Sun's UltraSPARC processor. Fujitsu claims that its PrimePower systems are complete binary compliant with Solaris and its applications.

Fujitsu goes its own way from Sun with its use of system bus derived from its mainframe system bus design. The company promises that this gives its Solaris system a maximum data transfer rate of 57.6 gigabytes per second. If true, this would be the highest throughput of any currently available commercial UNIX system. The PrimePower line also uses advanced error checking and correcting (ECC) for better data integrity in memory and along the system buses.