ACADEMIA

NEC Corporation of America today introduced new blade servers to the market. The NEC Express5800 SigmaBlade servers round out NEC’s already extensive line of servers to position NEC’s server family as one of the most comprehensive available. Express5800 SigmaBlades are powerful, high-performance servers that enable data center space consolidation and easy management, and improve total cost of ownership (TCO) over traditional rack-mounted servers. Designed for the enterprise, NEC Express5800 SigmaBlade servers are based on Intel Xeon processors. “NEC offers a comprehensive breadth and depth of quality IT products not available through other vendors,” said Marc Hafner, vice president of departmental servers, IT Platform Group, NEC Corporation of America. “These are complete solutions, integrated and optimized to meet customer needs and maximize investment value. By rounding out our portfolio of servers with SigmaBlades, NEC continues to offer the smartest IT choices for the dynamic infrastructure.” Express5800 SigmaBlade servers are specifically designed for data center solutions and run the most popular operating systems, so IT departments can easily run clustered and standard applications. SigmaBlade also supports popular hypervisor solutions making the data center dynamic, manageable, and energy efficient. These functional capabilities, combined with NEC’s rich heritage and leadership in supercomputing, mainframe, and fault tolerant technology, translates to make SigmaBlade one of the highest quality blade servers in the market. “NEC is the only vendor to offer a complete suite of Intel-based servers, including Intel Xeon-based fault tolerant servers, for enterprises of any size,” added Hafner. “From basic rack, tower and blade models to high-end servers and supercomputers, NEC delivers highly reliable servers to meet the unique performance and value requirements of virtually any enterprise environment.” NEC is launching three Express5800 SigmaBlade server models, and two blade chassis designed to be rack-mounted in the data center. All blade servers are two-socket servers based on the latest Intel Xeon 5200 and 5400 series processors.

• The SigmaBlade 120Bb-6 server features a standard blade-server chipset, two SAS 2.5-inch internal hard disk drives, and 32GB memory.
• The SigmaBlade120Bb-d6 SAN server features up to 96GB memory, has no internal hard disk drives, and requires a connection to SAN storage to meet its hard disk memory needs. This unique configuration is ideally suited for data center virtualization.
• The SigmaBlade 120Bb-m6 server is a dual-slot, high capacity blade – the most powerful blade server in its class – with the best features from the other blade servers in the product line, including up to 96GB memory and six SAS 2.5-inch hard disk drives.

Two different styles of chassis are available. The H-chassis is a 16-blade chassis requiring only 10u of rack space. The M-chassis is an 8-blade chassis requiring only 6u of rack space. Both provide pass-through and switch options in either 1GB Ethernet or fibre channel speeds. Also, these chassis provide for easy setup and configuration connectivity through a management module, redundant power supply modules, and fans to ensure that the servers will stay running beyond expectations. The NEC SigmaBlade system can be provisioned and managed by most blade management solutions or it can leverage NEC’s own blade management system, SigmaSystemCenter. NEC SigmaSystemCenter provides centralized IT management interfaces and monitoring tools for the entire SigmaBlade system through SigmaSystemCenter’s console. SigmaSystemCenter offers system administrators enhanced efficiency and flexibility through features for provisioning server resources; adding applications; monitoring performance, reliability, and server hardware; and automatic load balancing when virtualized hypervisors are used. Pricing & Availability Express5800 SigmaBlade servers are priced similar to rack-mounted servers with the same intended lifetime usage. However, NEC’s SigmaBlade servers include added features not found in rack-mounted servers, including lower servicing and support costs, and a reduction in energy usage. Organizations can expect a significant improvement to total cost of ownership with SigmaBlade servers over rack-mounted servers. All SigmaBlade servers come with a three-year onsite next business day warranty service. Other warranty enhancement options are available. The NEC SigmaBlade servers will be shipping in North America in July.