NEC grows fault-tolerant server range
Three new products emerged from NEC Computers on 13 November as the company expanded its fault-tolerant server offerings,...
NEC announced the Express5800/320La, a two-way fault-tolerant server for enterprise users and the Express5800/120Lf, a workgroup/departmental server based on Intel's Pentium III processor technology. The company also released the NEC ft Disk Expansion Unit (DEU), an external, rack-mountable storage device. All three products are available in the US; NEC will announce worldwide availability by the end of this year or early next year.
The Express5800/320La is the second fault-tolerant server from NEC, which unveiled a one-way server with the same product name in September. Fault-tolerant technology uses built-in redundancies to preserve mission-critical data in the event of a power failure or hardware problem, eliminating downtime, according to NEC.
The second server released, the Express5800/120Lf, is another two-way server that features 73Gb of internal storage, dual on-board Ethernet, support for up to six peripheral component interconnect I/O options and on-board system management logic without add-in cards, NEC said.
The company touted the server as having the widest range of features of two-way department/workgroup servers in its class and price range. For example, the server can handle everything from simple file and print tasks to a departmental system with e-mail, network access and database applications, said the company.
NEC has also released the NEC ft DEU, which the company says makes it the first fault-tolerant server manufacturer to provide external storage capacity for Intel-based fault-tolerant servers. The DEU contains 13 hot-swappable disk drives - adding up to 468Gb of storage capacity to NEC's fault-tolerant servers - and requires 6U of rack space. The DEU employs Veritas Software's Volume Manager software to allow the hard disks to be mirrored during data transfer.