Fujitsu/Fujitsu Siemens Computers PRIMEPOWER Enterprise Servers
© 2003 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved.
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intransigence over Intel and Itanium. Fujitsu is committed to using SPARC for its mainframes, however,
and like most Japanese companies, when it invests in technologies, it invests for the long term.
Nevertheless, there will always be questions over the minority players in the market. Compaq’s Tru64
AlphaServers had a 5 percent share of the worldwide Unix server market (by value) at a time when the
Unix market was still growing healthily, but this was not considered enough to sustain development of
Alpha. SGI hangs on determinedly with its MIPS-based servers in niche sectors of the server market, but
has a get-out clause with Linux and Intel Itanium. The difference of course between Fujitsu and these
players is that the Japanese developer isn’t the sole supplier of SPARC/Solaris platforms. If Fujitsu did
eventually decide it couldn’t afford to continue to develop its own SPARC-compatible architecture, its
customers could presumably return to Sun. In the meantime, customers can take advantage of an even
more scalable and available SPARC/Solaris server than Sun currently has to offer and a viable alternative
source for Sun customers.
By building to an established platform specification, Fujitsu/FSC benefits from a ready-made target market
and hasn’t had to build up a new platform from scratch. By adopting another vendor’s operating system,
however, Fujitsu/FSC must sacrifice some of the influence it could have over the direction its operating
system takes. So, for example, its XPARs, which provide greater granularity than Sun’s System Domains,
are limited by the number of partitions allowed by Solaris. Although Sun and Fujitsu/FSC are partners,
they’re also competitors, so that as we’ve already mentioned, Sun does not support PRIMEPOWER in its
Sun Cluster software.
To sum up, the PRIMEPOWER servers are a very viable alternative to Sun, provided clients are located
in geographical areas that are well served by Fujitsu, FTSI or FSC. In North America and some parts of
EMEA, the vendors’ local organizations may still be limited, however, and clients should ask for
references of customers in their vicinity. Insofar as the PRIMEPOWER servers represent the current
technological “gold standard” for Unix scalability and availability, clients should also evaluate them against
HP and IBM servers, again provided that local support and availability is not an issue.
Pricing
Table 5: Fujitsu PRIMEPOWER XA Enterprise Models
Model
Description
Price ($)
PRIMEPOWER 900
Low-End Configuration
PRIMEPOWER 900 base
cabinet (two system-board
slots), one system board
with two 1.35GHz CPUs,
4GB of memory, eight PCI
slots, two integrated
Ethernet controllers and
UltraSCSI controller, two
system disks, and Solaris 8
right-to-use license and
media
177,000
Midrange Configuration
As above, but with two
system boards, eight
CPUs, 8GB of memory and
four system disks
365,000
