Fujitsu’s PRIMERGY BX400 Opens Up Blade Computing for Midsize Companies

Sydney, November 25, 2010

Fujitsu today announces the global availability of blade server technology designed especially for smaller and mid-size businesses that are looking for scalable efficiencies and consolidation. The new PRIMERGY BX400 is a fully-featured blade system built from the ground up as a user-friendly and versatile infrastructure designed for midsized customers with large computing and storage requirements, including branch offices.

The PRIMERGY BX400 is a green datacenter in a box, providing an optimum combination of up to eight server or storage blades in a small enclosure, supported by a comprehensive set of solutions and services. It combines leading-edge technology, such as a fully integrated virtual storage appliance using technology from Fujitsu’s partnership with NetApp, with impressive input/output flexibility and bandwidth known from the PRIMERGY BX900 ‘Dynamic Cube’ blade system introduced last year.

Easy to install and manage, the PRIMERGY BX400 allows companies to spend less time on set-up and management and instead focus on the core business processes essential for profitability. Simplified lifecycle management reduces daily operational costs by up to 60 percent. Like all PRIMERGY servers, the BX400 ships with Fujitsu’s ServerView software suite, allowing easy and integrated system management and monitoring. Additional software components such ServerView Resource Coordinator VE and Virtual IO Manager deliver uniform operations for pools of physical and virtual servers combined with cost-effective high availability.

The consolidated design makes the PRIMERGY BX400 more affordable than other blade servers on the market, while saving office space. As small and midsized companies often have restricted available space, two different system versions of the PRIMERGY BX400 allow for flexibility to fit various environments. The rack version can be integrated easily into an industry standard 19-inch Fujitsu rack or other third-party racks. The floorstand version can fit under a desk or in reception areas without distraction, with low noise levels of only 45 decibels making it one of the quietest available.

Jens-Peter Seick, Senior Vice President Datacenter Systems at Fujitsu Technology Solutions says, “Midsize companies with large data volumes have similar IT needs to enterprises, but are more constrained by available IT expertise and budgets. The PRIMERGY BX400 is a complete Dynamic Infrastructure of up to eight server and storage blades as well as network components supplemented with Fujitsu services extended into the cloud with Dynamic Services. Its small size is ideally suited for midsized companies with big computing and storage needs, needing no specialised power, cooling, or IT expertise.”

Energy-efficient, cost-sensitive, easy to install and manage; the new PRIMERGY BX400 helps businesses increase productivity via greater IT efficiency and drive down costs for storage and computing requirements. It reduces power bills by up to 30 percent1, and since it also emits less heat, also minimises the strain on air conditioning, while cutting CO2 emissions. Businesses also benefit from the PRIMERGY family’s scalable and modular infrastructure, as well as from Fujitsu’s extensive range of global infrastructure services.

Fujitsu’s comprehensive PRIMERGY server blade portfolio can host the full range of applications in both physical and virtualised environments, equipped as they are with the latest Intel Xeon 5600 series processors and large memory capacities. Fujitsu offers a fully integrated virtual storage appliance in combination with PRIMERGY server blades servers, plus a connection to the cloud to expand customers’ on-site infrastructure capabilities with quick and easy access to individually configured server, storage and backup resources.

If business requirements change, it’s easy for companies to add or expand PRIMERGY Blade Servers to meet the new demands. The PRIMERGY BX400 is fully compatible with each component of the comprehensive PRIMERGY BX blade portfolio. For larger enterprises that need an enhancement to the PRIMERGY BX900, but don’t need the computing power of 18 server blades, the PRIMERGY BX400 can enhance and supplement current configurations.

PRIMERGY BX series is designed for a broad range of application areas, from web servers or terminal server farms with lower performance demands through to high performance database or application server configurations. Fujitsu’s PRIMERGY BX400 supports all current and previous versions of popular operating systems like Windows and Linux, as well as common hypervisors like Microsoft HyperV, VMware and Citrix Xen. The PRIMERGY BX400 can be equipped with the same PRIMERGY BX server, storage, connection and management blades known from the PRIMERGY BX900, which have achieved several world records in industry standard benchmarks.

“The PRIMERGY BX400 provides an optimal solution for addressing the storage requirements of midsized customers as they move to flexible, integrated, shared IT infrastructure solutions,” said Rick Scurfield, vice president, Global System Partner at NetApp. “By leveraging the virtual storage appliance with NetApp Data ONTAP-v, customers can benefit from NetApp’s proven and innovative storage efficiency capabilities which help customers achieve greater cost savings and invest in innovating for the future.”

The PRIMERGY BX400 will be available globally in December 2010, and is on the pricelist now.