SYSTEMS

Sunnyvale, CA - Fujitsu Technology Solutions, Inc., a member of the worldwide group of Fujitsu companies, today announced its next generation of Solaris compatible, SPARC compliant PRIMEPOWER servers with extended architecture for business-critical UNIX enterprise environments. High-end PRIMEPOWER extended architecture server models introduce the most powerful 1.3GHz processors in the industry, and the systems significantly expand customers' ability to support 24 x 7 global e-business challenges. This announcement marks a new evolutionary step for the robust line of PRIMEPOWER servers, signaling the completion of a successful introduction into North America during a period in which PRIMEPOWER server sales have more than doubled in volume while the server marketplace has seen reduced growth for other Open Systems suppliers. "The focus on our customers' need for business-critical computing solutions that deliver real business benefits is illustrated by innovations our systems offer in partitioning, dynamic upgrade and hotplug capabilities, and high performance clustering features," said Richard McCormack, vice president of product marketing at Fujitsu Technology Solutions Inc. "With these servers, customers will also gain industry leading levels of availability and resilience not previously available in commercial UNIX systems. These advanced capabilities are the result of the introduction into the architecture of mainframe design techniques developed by Fujitsu over the last 30 years." "Fujitsu's new line of PRIMEPOWER servers with extended architecture is an exciting new technology in the company's continued development of advanced open systems solutions," said Richard Partridge, vice president of enterprise servers with analyst firm DH Brown Associates. "The combination of additional mainframe features and functionality within the Solaris operating environment will undoubtedly be attractive to customers looking for choice and continued value from their UNIX systems." One of the new and exclusive mainframe capabilities that the PRIMEPOWER extended architecture will deliver is a unique feature called hardware instruction retry. When an instruction fails to execute it is immediately retried at the CPU level. This is different from all other UNIX systems offered today. All other vendors handle a failed instruction execution by retrying the instruction in the software. This retry entails flushing and then rebuilding the software buffers before re-executing the failed instruction, which is a time consuming procedure. PRIMEPOWER systems on the other hand will retry a failed instruction at the hardware level that allows the instruction be retried immediately. There is no time consuming flushing and rebuilding of the software buffers. Extended partitioning, which allows partition granularity at lower than the system board level, in fact down to the CPU level, will also be available. The new family of servers will contain up to 8 CPUs on each system board. This new generation of high performance processors includes 6-way execution units for faster performance and error protected functional building blocks for higher reliability. In addition, PRIMEPOWER servers with extended architecture provide condensed server packaging. The reduced footprint, cableless interconnects, and high-density system boards of these news systems help reduce space requirements. "Oracle welcomes this new robust line of open systems servers from Fujitsu," said Doug Kennedy, vice president, Platform Alliances, System Platforms Division at Oracle. "The combination of Oracle® and PRIMEPOWER technology will help increase the reach of powerful solutions to a much wider base of customers." PRIMEPOWER servers with extended architecture are the most scalable, reliable high-end commercial systems in the UNIX market, and in the PRIMEPOWER line Fujitsu continues to offer the only 128-way server in the industry. With the new family of servers, customers will gain an improved ability to consolidate application workloads onto fewer servers, reducing IT costs. Increased operational benefits such as increased flexibility for partitioning workloads across a single server, results from the introduction of denser logic and component integration on the system board. "Fujitsu's new PRIMEPOWER servers offer an impressive platform for high availability and data manageability when combined with market leading clustering and storage management software from VERITAS," said Brenda Zawatski, vice president of product and solutions marketing, VERITAS Software. "Through our collaboration, VERITAS and Fujitsu will deliver a solution that allows our customers 24x7 access to mission critical data and addresses their business requirements for efficiency, flexibility, and cost-effective computing." "The selection of the Solaris 9 Operating Environment is a great match to the new PRIMEPOWER," said Graham Lovell, Marketing Director, Sun Microsystems. "The Solaris OE has already proven its excellent scalability and availability in the data center and best meets the needs of mission critical environments for availability and security." The acceptance of PRIMEPOWER in heterogeneous IT environments is enhanced by its industry recognized Managed Services offering from Fujitsu Technology Solutions, which provides customers a way to significantly cut costs and consolidate support services from multiple vendors to just one. Fujitsu's PRIMEPOWER extended architecture servers are now generally available, while the new 1.3GHz processors will be available across the board in the first quarter of calendar year 2003. Models 2500, 1500, and 900 servers will contain the 1.3GHz processors. History of SPARC Innovation A founding member of SPARC International in 1988 and the original developer of the SPARC processor, Fujitsu continues to be at the forefront of SPARC development. As a primary technical contributor, Fujitsu worked with Sun to develop the 64-bit extension in 1986. Fujitsu's SPARC64® processors are now the heart and soul of its PRIMEPOWER servers, the most powerful, highest performing, UNIX based, Solaris compatible servers in the market.