14 DAY TRIAL // NEC intends to gradually become more visible on the U.S. market, and has consequently introduced a high-end enterprise Xeon server this month, following a period of six to eight months during which the company has been constantly releasing products for the U.S. The new low-power Intel-based rack-mount server and a four-socket blade server were launched on Tuesday. The latest release included the energy efficient Express 5800/i120Ra-e1 server and the Express 5800/140Ba-10 blade.
[admark=1]According to NEC, Intel's low-voltage Xeon processors, along with a redesigned power supply, allow the 1U rack-mount i120Ra-e1 server to gain a lot in terms of power efficiency. E7500, E7501 and E7520 are included in the low-power Xeons. There will be up to two multi-core Xeons packed inside the new server, with core clock speeds of 3.2 GHz and a power consumption of 103 watts. Moreover, the new system will support 3.5-inch Serial Attached SCSI and Serial ATA disk drives with optional RAID 5 capability. The available OSes include Windows Server, as well as Red Hat, SUSE and Fedora Linux. The price tag is set at $1,800.
16 DIMM memory sockets for up to 64 GB of memory are included in the Express 5800/140Ba-10 blade. The server packs up to four Xeon E7220 dual-core or E7340 quad-core processors. The blade features NEC's H-Chassis, supports up to four 2.5-inch disk bays, and has a price starting at $6,500.
NEC's new servers offer lower power consumption in a context in which more and more blade servers fill up data centers and increase electricity usage. Also, the requirements for processor cycles, memory and storage have been leveraged due to the latest advances in the field. NEC sells most of its products in Japan, Europe and Asia Pacific. According to the company, it has also built servers for companies that sell in U.S. The introduction of a new Xeon server this month will mean a step forward towards the achievement of NEC's plans of making its brand more visible on the U.S. market.
At the moment, NEC is not included in the top five worldwide server vendors. The company shares 13 percent of the market with other vendors, which are also not included in the top five. IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu/Fujitsu Siemens are the companies that rule the market.