INDUSTRY

Taiwanese electronics giant, Tatung, best known in the UK for its digital consumer products, is to market a range of high-end servers in the UK for the first time, following the launch of Tatung Server Ltd this week. The new operation will market a wide range of PC, storage and blade servers, and is aiming to capture up to 10 per cent of the market, pitching itself directly against leaders such as IBM and Dell. Tatung has been in the server business for over a decade, manufacturing over 300,000 servers a year for leading vendors, but has not previously offered the products in the UK under the Tatung brand. The company will now market server hardware manufactured at its facility in the Netherlands, offering high performance systems at "highly competitive" pricing. Blade servers will be launched in the UK first, followed quickly by PC servers and Storage Area Network (SAN) servers. The complete product range will all be available by the end of Q4 2004. According to Andre Hu, European Sales Manager of Tatung Server, the company is well positioned to take a significant market share, quickly. "We have many years of experience in design and manufacture, and huge credibility from the OEM products we make for the leading vendors in the market. We shall be offering high performance servers with very competitive RRPs to UK corporate customers though a distribution channel." Tatung Server is also offering UK customers a unique "try before you buy" package. Corporates will be able to install Tatung product for 30 days without charge to evaluate the technical offering. All the Tatung server products will come with a full three-year on-site maintenance contract. Tatung has already signed up broadline distributor, Microtronica Ltd, to handle its product range, and expects to appoint two further distributors this year. Designed for Low Cost Ownership Tatung has developed powerful deployment and management tools for its server range to reduce management overhead. Servers can be deployed quickly and easy; system managers will require only 30 minutes training to be proficient; and the Tatung Server Management software provides a fully integrated management environment, unlike other manufacturers' software that is modular and time-consuming to use. Price/Performance Advantage All Tatung's products promise a price/performance advantage over competitors. The company's blade servers, for example, are more compact and consume less power than any other products on the market. The Tatung 4u blades can be combined to deliver over 200 CPUs in a single cabinet - around 30% more computing power than any other design, and yet consume 25% less power, not only making considerable savings on consumption and cooling requirements, but allowing Tatung's blade servers to be installed in office environments.