Fujitsu Plans Mainframe Replacement In June

Fujitsu Ltd. plans to introduce in June an Itanium-based server positioned as a mainframe replacement, company officials said at a press conference Tuesday in San Francisco.

Fujitsu's Primequest, which will be able to house up to 32 Itanium 2 processors from Intel, is set for general release in the United States in June. It will be certified to run Red Hat Inc.'s version of the Linux operating system, with certification for Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 and Novell's SuSE version of Linux expected in September. Toyota Motor Corp. has bought a version in Japan, and the system has been undergoing beta tests in the United States.

Fujitsu, the $45.1 billion-a-year Japanese IT company, also jointly develops Unix servers with Sun Microsystems. The new Primequest system, designed for running databases and online transaction processing systems, will aim to replace IBM mainframes and compete with open systems from IBM and Hewlett-Packard, according to Fujitsu. The company expects benchmark results that show the system runs the TPC-C test software and an SAP benchmark better than its competitors, but it hasn't released any numbers yet. During the next three years, Fujitsu expects to sell 10,000 of the systems, corporate executive VP Chiaki Ito says.

The Primequest system will be sold by Fujitsu Ltd. in Asia, by Fujitsu Computer Systems in North America, and by the Fujitsu Siemens Computers joint venture with Germany's Siemens in Europe.