NEC aims fault tolerant servers at small business

Stephen Withers
Monday, 26 May 2008 12:23

Your IT - Home IT

Fault tolerance - the ability to continue operation despite a hardware failure - has traditionally been a feature of systems aimed at banks, telcos and other enterprises that require extremely high uptime. But NEC thinks the time has come to take the technology to small and medium businesses.

The company's new quad-core Xeon-based Express5800/320Fd-MR and -LR servers feature NEC's proprietary GeminiEngine chipset to maintain synchronisation of the redundant components (CPU, memory, I/O components, hard disk drives, and cooling fans) without CPU overhead. This is achieved by running the components in parallel - thus if a failure occurs, all that's necessary is to automatically isolate the failed component. It can then be replaced while operation continues.

The difference between the LR and MR models is that the former is equipped with a 2GHz CPU, while the latter's runs at 3GHz.

NEC officials see server consolidation as a driver for fault tolerance. That makes sense - the more functions running on one box, the more important it is that it keeps running. Support for VMware ESX is expected in September 2008.

The optional Active Upgrade feature allows for operating system and application updates without interruption. It works by splitting the server into two systems so that one can be updated while the other runs as normal.

Prices start at $A20,000.