NEC Four-Way Server Supports High-Availability Apps

Continuing its effort to establish the company as a leading supplier of fault tolerant servers, NEC Solutions America Inc. today will introduce a four-processor server.

"We are working to become the high-availability company," says Brad Lightner, director of product and solution integration for NEC. "Our design goal is to consistently put fault tolerant servers at 99.999% of uptime."

NEC has previously offered fault-tolerant systems designed for departmental or process-control applications. The new system, the Express5800/340Hb, is designed for data-center applications, server consolidation, and server virtualization, Lightner says.

The product rollout is being made in conjunction with Microsoft's Virtual Server application introduction, creating a system that can run multiple operating-system application stacks on a single hardware platform.

The system utilizes a blade-server architecture and features hot-swappable functionality. The expandable platform comes in a 10U rack form factor with four 2.8 GHz Xeon processors and Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition.

The base unit is available now, starting at $149,999.