By Rik Turner and William Fellows
Fujitsu Siemens Computers BV, the Dutch-based merger of the Japanese and German groups’ European computer businesses, said yesterday it will ultimately drop Fujitsu’s work with Intel’s Profusion chipset and converge its eight-processor server lines into a single offering based on Siemens’ proprietary third-level caching solution.
Interesting that, because yesterday Fujitsu put out a release from Tokyo saying it would be shipping new eight-way TeamServer – that ICL-derived server line uses Profusion – by the end of the year. The Teamserver HS900 will take up 7U rackmount units compared with the 10U the four-way used.
Robert Hoog, president of Fujitsu Siemens with responsibility for product and supply operations, said in Frankfurt that in the short term the Siemens and Fujitsu product lines will survive as we have commitments to our customer. But in time, he added, they will converge based on Siemens technology.
Fujitsu Siemens’ decision to drop Intel’s Profusion chipset in favor of proprietary Siemens technology – which requires an additional board – runs in the face of perceived industry wisdom. However, from the perspective of Europe’s new number two computer maker, it has the merit of offering existing Siemens four-way users a cheaper upgrade path, exploiting the space already available in their four-way boxes. Siemens’ total installed server base in Europe is around 130,000 machines.
Fujitsu’s 100,000-strong European server customer base will not be forced down the Siemens path immediately. Eight-way boxes based on Profusion will be available shortly, the company said, but down the road these machines will be superceded by Fujitsu Siemens ones incorporating the Siemens technology.
Siemens says Primergy is operating system agnostic and can run Windows NT, SCO UnixWare, Sun Solaris x86, OS/2 (which is still big in German banks) or NetWare. It sees Solaris on Primergy as an ISP play.
Meantime the company said that while it will over time phase out its MIPS-based Reliant Unix and BS mainframe servers it will move both platforms over to Intel Corp’s IA-64 architecture. The mainframe business is core to the new venture and is said to be accelerating at an amazing speed.
Siemens says it’s not right to say it has transferred its 32-bit Solaris x86 resources over to Solaris Sparc – the new venture will be selling Fujitsu’s GPS7000 and other Sparc servers (see seperate story) – rather than it has fulfilled its contract with Sun under which it was to turn over hig-availability and other Reliant Unix code to Sun. That work is done an the code will show up in Solaris, Siemens says.
