Fujitsu’s new Itanium servers for Windows and Linux users

Fujitsu Limited has launched two new servers targeted to bring mainframe-class features to Windows and Linux users. The company had been working on these servers for around 2 years and it represents the company’s first attempt at building high-end systems using Intel Corp.’s Itanium 2 microprocessor. The systems are named PrimeQuest 480 and PrimeQuest 440.

Fujitsu Corporate Executive Vice President Chiaki said in a press release to the media: “The PrimeQuest is the next generation of mainframe. However, this mainframe is different from the current legacy mainframes.” For a change, the company is using standard technologies to build their systems provided by Intel, Microsoft Corp. and Red Hat Inc.

The company would be providing these servers in the market from June and initially only Red Hat Operating System would be offered. In the latest stages, more support in the form of Novell Inc.’s SUSE Linux and Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition will be added. These processors have been developed with the capabilities of supporting as many as 32 processors.

The company targets to reach server systems with around 1TB of memory as they further develop their technology. However, there is no official date set for that release.

The PrimeQuest 480: This server system would be offered with 32-processor system with around 512GB of memory.

PrimeQuest 440: This server system would be offered with 16-processor system with around 256GB of memory.

Both these servers would come with either the 1 GHz or 1.5 GHz version of Intel’s Madison 9M Itanium 2 processors.