PRIMEQUEST servers prove hugely effective in reducing TCO
Over the past few years, Fujitsu Limited has implemented a program that substantially reduced the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of the company’s mission-critical indirect purchasing systems. By consolidating several legacy applications onto PRIMEQUEST servers running the Linux operating system, Fujitsu was able to reduce its TCO by 53.6 percent. The company realized savings across all key metrics, including hardware, software, data center occupancy, and personnel costs. In addition to the TCO savings, Fujitsu realized significant gains in workforce efficiency by integrating their purchasing applications during the consolidation project.
In a recent white paper co-authored by Fujitsu Limited and Intel Corporation entitled “Reducing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Through Server Consolidation”, details were provided about this highly successful program. To read the entire white paper, as well as a number of other interesting PRIMEQUEST-related papers, please go to the PRIMEQUEST Case Studies page.
Oracle Database 10g breaks record using PRIMEQUEST 540 server
On February 14, Oracle Corporation announced that it had achieved a TPC-C performance benchmark record result for the Itanium platform using Oracle(R) Database 10g on Fujitsu PRIMEQUEST(r) 540 server and the Linux operating system. This latest benchmark also signified world-class achievement among 16-processor Linux systems. Running on Fujitsu PRIMEQUEST 540 servers with 16 Intel Itanium(r) 2 1.6 GHz processors, Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition on Oracle Enterprise Linux 4 operating system achieved 1,238,579 tpmC (transactions per minute) with a price-performance ratio of $3.94/tpmC.
According to the Oracle press release: "Our customers choose Oracle Database 10g on Lintel-based platforms to achieve the highest levels of OLTP performance while keeping infrastructure costs to a minimum," said Richard Sarwal, senior vice president of Systems Management, Oracle. "We are committed to providing enterprises with highly scalable databases and functionality to support the most demanding transaction processing, business intelligence and content management applications."
"The Fujitsu PRIMEQUEST 540 servers are built to meet robust enterprise database demands with the industry's highest reliability and performance in Linux environments. Designed with Fujitsu mainframe expertise, PRIMEQUEST servers are ideal for large-scale database systems and online transaction processing environments," said Richard McCormack, senior vice president of marketing for Fujitsu Computer Systems.
Please click here to read the press release in its entirety.
Major hospital adopts PRIMEQUEST for integrated information system
Earlier this month, Fujitsu Limited announced that Nagoya University Hospital in Japan has deployed Fujitsu's PRIMEQUEST mission-critical IA server for its new integrated hospital information system. The system is a complete platform for the entire hospital services, including the electronic medical record system and other systems such as examination systems in each department. The new system provided by Fujitsu consists of a PRIMEQUEST server, PRIMERGY BX620 S3 blade servers, and ETERNUS storage systems. Integrating PC servers onto the PRIMEQUEST server enables the time required to access electronic medical records to be reduced to approximately one-third the time that was previously needed. The new system has been operating since January 2007.
Nagoya University Hospital, one of the core medical institutions in central Japan, sees approximately 500,000 outpatients per year and has 29 departments and 1,035 beds. The hospital has been an early-adopter of health information technology (HIT), such as implementing an electronic medical record system in 2002.
To read more about this critical integration, please open the press release here.
Fujitsu first to offer solid state drives in pen-enabled notebooks
On March 19, Fujitsu Computer Systems Corporation introduced the first pen-enabled notebooks with solid state drives (SSDs). The LifeBook® P1610 and LifeBook B6210 ultra-portables will offer an option for an SSD, an advanced NAND flash-based replacement for traditional hard disk drives. The rugged-enhanced notebooks, designed for optimal portability and data protection, are ideal for medium-sized and large organizations within vertical markets, including healthcare, aviation, and field service, which require a light and compact, but highly durable mobile computer.
The 2.2-pound LifeBook P1610 convertible touch screen notebook and 3.2-pound LifeBook B6210 touch screen notebook are now offered with two flash-based SSD configurations, 16 GB or 32 GB. SSDs offer lower power consumption, enhanced ruggedness, high reliability, and improved performance.
In addition to providing significantly more durability and data protection than traditional hard disk drives, there are no moving parts to fail or heads to crash. SSDs are noise free, generate virtually no heat and weigh half as much as traditional notebook hard drives. SSDs also offer faster performance and quicker boot-up time because data access is virtually instantaneous. Unlike traditional hard disk drives there is no need to spin the platters up to speed, no seek time, and no rotational latency. SSDs also read two times faster and write up to 60% faster than other hard drives. In addition to the added durability all of this translates to a much faster experience and longer battery life.
To read more about this exciting new technology, go to the press release here.
Kyushu University supercomputer to incorporate 33 PRIMEQUEST 580 servers
On March 14, Fujitsu Limited announced that it had received an order for a supercomputer system from the Computing and Communications Center at Kyushu University in Japan. The center is one of seven national supercomputer centers in a consortium of universities. The Kyushu supercomputer will be the most powerful in the consortium.
The Computing and Communications Center offers advanced computing services for computational science, including fluid analysis and molecular science, to on and off-campus researchers. The new system will be capable of 31.5 teraflops (a teraflop is one trillion floating-point operations per second), making it the most powerful supercomputer among the seven centers. The new supercomputer will help meet the growing demand for scientific and technical computing at academic and research institutions.
The new supercomputing system will be a hybrid consisting of two cluster systems. A large symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) cluster of 32 Fujitsu PRIMEQUEST 580 mission-critical IA servers, along with a cluster of 384 Fujitsu PRIMERGY RX200 S3 industry standard servers, will be complemented by a single PRIMEQUEST 580 acting as a file-management server.
To learn more about this powerful new system, read the entire Fujitsu press release here.
Fujitsu joins the Microsoft Partner Solutions Center
Located on the Microsoft Redmond, WA campus, the Microsoft Partner Solutions Center (MPSC) is a state-of-the-art IT engagement lab designed to demonstrate real customer solutions running at scale, large scale, via the PRIMEQUEST Itanium Server line. The facilities and services are structured to engage the enterprise level customer through executive briefings, technology demonstrations, architectural design sessions, running proof-of-concept scenarios, and training. Fujitsu and Microsoft have built upon their longstanding alliance by bringing our collective technology and service expertise to a true solution level. With this investment customers gain unique exposure to Microsoft and Fujitsu solutions and support. At the core of this experience is the lab engagement, a one-to-one customer engagement that focuses on addressing specific problems or providing proof-of-concept for a Fujitsu Microsoft Server Solution. MPSC lab engagements can help you improve the implementation of your solution, get the most out of the technology, and save time and money in the process. Engagements can last from one week to several months, depending on the scope of work. Short-term proof-of-concept lab engagements can demonstrate exactly how Microsoft products and Fujitsu technologies can improve your business. Engagements can include migration services, scale testing, back-up and recovery testing, high availability service design/scaling, automated purposing frameworks, .NET development best practices, data center design, data center operational best practices, and more. MPSC staff members and your Fujitsu account team can help you estimate costs. To set up a lab engagement or find out more about MPSC offerings, contact your Fujitsu account manager or send e-mail to greuter@us.fujitsu.com
Fujitsu and Microsoft present webcast on legacy modernization
On March 28, a webcast featuring Ron Langer, Vice President of Legacy Modernization for Fujitsu, and Michael Dee Hester, Mainframe Modernization Program Manager for Microsoft was broadcast on SearchCIO.com. For the next 12 weeks you will be able to view this webcast to find out how to reuse valuable mainframe application assets while leveraging the price, power, and performance of Microsoft technology. And get the answers you've been looking for to questions about making the move from the mainframe. If your business currently relies on a mainframe, chances are you've run into one or more of the following issues: limited flexibility, low productivity, high costs and finite support of the overall platform. Watch this "Legacy Modernization using .NET" webcast, jointly presented by Microsoft and Fujitsu to learn how to enable your applications to:
- Leverage agility for competitive advantage
- Enhance application performance
- Increase developer productivity
- Combine mainframe and Windows development teams and more
To register for the webcast, go to this link on SearchCIO.com.