14 DAY TRIAL // The NEC and Stratus companies joined together in a partnership to design and build a fault tolerant server line that was supposed to start shipping in late June, but because of some technical problems, the launch was postponed until mid July. As of this week, customers will find the fault tolerant storage servers centered around Intel's processors, more exactly the quad core server chip Xeon 5300, named Clovertown.
The partnership between NEC and Stratus is already two years old, following a deal struck in the late 2005. The new server family will be shipped as either the NEC Express 5800/320Fc or the Stratus ftServer 6200. The processor inside these servers is a Xeon running at 2.66GHz and has a pair of 4MB level 2 cache. The frontside bus has a frequency of 1333MHz and the memory is truly gigantic as no less then 24GB of DDR2 can fit inside. For storage, users can choose between either six SAS or SATA disks in boxes, while the extension ports are represented by 6 PCI-X ports or in some versions by a combination of 2 PCI-Express and 4 PCI-X slots.
The server's fault tolerant design means in fact that every "full" server is composed of two identical servers linked together by a memory bus. If one of the servers fails, no sweat, the other will pick up the workload and carry on without any lost transactions. Both companies, NEC and Stratus alike, support Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition, the 32-bit variant and according to Stratus, the server variant with 64-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 pre installed will not be available until September.
On the low and middle level, users will find the NEC Express 5800/320Fc-LR and the Stratus' ftServer 4400, together with the NEC's Express 5800/320Fc-MR and Stratus' ftServer 4400. These machines come with dual core Xeon 3100 processors running at 2GHz, 6 or 12 GB of installed RAM and the usual 6 SAS or SATA storage devices.