NEC Ships Fault Tolerant Four-Way Server

NEC Solutions on Monday shipped a four-way, high-availability server it's pitching to enterprises as, among other things, the hardware to host virtual systems such as those made possible by Microsoft's upcoming Virtual Server 2005.

NEC's Express5800/340Hb, powered by four Intel Xeon MP 2.8GHz processors, packed with as much as 12GB of memory, and shipped with Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition, is up and running 99.999 percent of the time according to NEC.

The server is NEC's bid to take on rivals Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Sun in the highly-competitive data center and server consolidation market as well as virtualization scenarios, said NEC officials, who stressed the hardware's high-availability features such as instantaneous fail-over and remote monitoring.

"NEC is the only major enterprise manufacturer to offer a four-way high-availability server [that averages] less than five minutes of unplanned downtime per year," claimed Larry Sheffield, a senior vice president of NEC, in a statement.

The base configuration of the Express5800/340Hb comes with 2GB of memory and a pair of 18GB drives, and is priced starting at $150,000.