NEC Corporation today announced the global launch (*1) of its two new “NEC Express5800/ft series” based on the Intel® Xeon® E5-2600 v2 product family, the mid-range “NEC Express5800/R320d-M4,” and the “NEC Express5800/R320d-E4″ entry model which support Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2. This is a Fault Tolerant (FT) server that reduces the risk of downtime caused by a hardware fault through hardware redundancy in all components, including CPU, memory and disk.
“This new product is optimal for mission-critical systems infrastructure. NEC will offer it to businesses and other organizations in order to contribute to the safe, secure use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure that supports societal and corporate activities,” said Tetsuhide Senta, Assistant General Manager, Americas and Global Platform Division, NEC Corporation.
The recent advancement of virtualization technologies has led to a rapid increase in the number of systems built on virtual infrastructure, with the integration of multiple systems and the use of the private cloud taking place in a wide variety of fields. Virtualization permits users to expect a significant reduction in ICT costs because it enables multiple systems to operate on a single high-performance server. However, virtualization involves a risk — if there is a hardware fault, it can have an enormous impact on systems as a whole, resulting in a significant number of labor hours required for recovery.
The Express5800/R320d fault-tolerant servers are free from this risk. Even if a hardware fault should occur, it allows the business system to continue operating without being affected by the fault, thanks to hardware redundancy. This helps customers to ensure efficient ICT investments and the safe use of their business systems.
Primary features of the new Express5800/ft series include:
Enhanced expandability as well as 1.2 times the processing performance of existing models
The NEC Express5800/R320d-M4 comes with as many as two (*2) Intel(R) Xeon(R) processors, a 10-core CPU, and features a maximum memory operating frequency of 1600MHz as compared to 1333MHz with existing models. This has resulted in up to 1.2 times (*3) the processing performance of existing models. In addition, the new product has a hard disk storage capacity of up to 9.6 terabytes.
Moreover, NEC plans to support Windows Server(R) 2012 Hyper-V(R) and support SSD as a secondary storage device on the R320d models. These new features, which are planned to be supported in June this year, can be utilized for a wide range of virtual systems.
Support for readily available monitoring software that handles software faults
If a hardware fault should occur, the fault tolerant server automatically disconnects the faulty hardware and continues to operate through redundant hardware. For software failures, NEC offers optional monitoring software, “ExpressCluster X SingleServerSafe,” which, in the event of a minor software fault that does not affect the overall system, will attempt to restart the faulty software and automatically recover.