Puteaux & Les Clayes (Paris), 30 June 1998 — Zenith Data Systems (ZDS) and Groupe BULL reinforce their strong positions in the Enterprise Windows NT Server market by announcing plans to introduce new enterprise servers incorporating Intel’s revolutionary Pentium® II Xeon™ processor. A Pentium® II Xeon™ upgrade kit for the Pentium® Pro-based Express5800 HX4100,HX6100 and HV8000 series is also pre-announced.
“These upcoming Express5800™ servers, based on Intel’s new Pentium® II Xeon™ processor, will redefine the performance and scalability limits of current Pentium® Pro Enterprise server technology.” said Michel Motro, Vice-President and Managing Director of Zenith Data Systems Europe. “By leveraging our strong relationship with Intel, we are able to deliver the latest technology and offer higher performance, capacity, availability and expandability while maintaining existing price points.’’
Pushing back the frontiers of performance
Supporting one to four 400MHz Pentium® II Xeon™ processors with 512KB or 1MB of onboard cache, the compact yet powerful Express5800™ MH4500 and the highly expandable HX4500 are built to excel in challenging processing environments. Both systems are I2O ready and come with a minimum of 128MB of ECC RAM (max. 4GB). The MH4500 is designed for scalable, business-critical distributed enterprise applications. The HX4500 is designed for businesses deploying power-hungry enterprise applications requiring unfailing 24/7 high-performance. Whether running mission critical databases or serving as a heavy traffic web server, the MH4500 and the HX4500 offer processing power that can scale to meet any company’s needs.
In addition, the record breaking Pentium® Pro-based Express5800™ HX4100 and HX6100 Enterprise systems are fully upgradeable to 4-way Pentium® II Xeon™, serving to future-proof current customers that may later wish to upgrade to the new processor.
Throughput and performance are optimised with ultra-fast 80MB/s integrated Ultra2 SCSI disk controllers in the MH4500, and with the optional Ultra2 RAID board in the HX4500. The MH4500 offers six PCI expansion slots as well as one shared ISA/PCI slot. The HX4500 offers nine PCI expansion slots arranged on three separate buses as well as two ISA slots.
Both systems are certified for the most popular server operating environments. Additionally, since the Express5800 MH4500 and HX4500 comply with the Intel Multiprocessing Specification (MPS), they are perfectly compatible with all major operating environments.
To even more reinforce this strategy towards Enterprise Windows NT servers, the existing Express5800™ HV8000, an 8-way server using the Pentium® Pro precossor, will upgrade by the end of the year to an 8-way Pentium® II Xeon™ design. . Bull and ZDS will then prove again, their ability to deliver significant, time-to-market innovation.
Flexible format adapts to space and storage requirements
To ensure data integrity and availability, Express5800™ MH4500 and HX4500 come with high-availability features such as hot swappable redundant power supplies and redundant cooling, with the further option of a tri-channel Ultra2 Wide RAID board. For the HX4500, depending on customer storage needs, the 4, 8 or 12 hot-plug bays support 4, 9 and 18GB disk drives for up to 216GB of storage. The MH4500 boasts a highly compact form factor that enables rackmountability in 7U, with 6 hot-swap hard disk drives bays for a maximum storage of 54.6GB. The Express5800™ HX4500 is available in either a floor or 14U rack-mount format, depending or floor space requirements.
Easy Installation and Management built-in
Included with the Express5800™’s MH4500 and HX4500 as well as the rest of the Express5800 family are ESMPRO Management Suite and ExpressBuilder installation software at no charge. ESMPRO is available in both Windows and Web-based versions, both of which allow a network administrator to monitor, control and manage critical operations and components of their Express5800™ servers. ExpressBuilder software is an easy to use application that allows a network administrator to configure Express5800™ servers before installation of Windows NT Server or other Operating Environments.
Availability
The Express5800™ MH4500 will be available in August. The upgrade kit for the Express5800™ HX4100 and HX6100 series will be available in September. The upgrade kit for the existing HV8000 will be available next December. The Express5800 HX4500 is due for release in October.
These systems will complement what is already one of the industries’ broadest server ranges, featuring nine systems to choose between today, extending from the entry mono-processor TeamMate TM1000 system to the 8-way HV8000 enterprise application server,
About Zenith Data Systems
ZDS is a leading supplier of high-performance Corporate IT hardware, marketing it’s servers, desktops and notebooks to the corporate and educational markets through an indirect sales channel. It has engineering and manufacturing facilities in Angers (France), Puteaux (Paris region), Boxborough (Massachusetts), and Sacramento (California).
Bull is an international I.T. group based in Europe with 21,267 people and operating in more than 85 countries. In 1997, Bull earned revenues of $4.2 billion, of which over 65% was generated outside France, its country of origin. Bull offers a wide range of systems, infrastructure software and I.T. services, through focused innovation, alliances with the best partners and its own integration expertise. In the I.T. industry, Bull is recognised for innovative products such as Escala servers, CP8 smart cards, Express5800 and infrastructure software such as OpenMaster and SecurWare. In I.T. services, Bull is ranked in Europe as the third largest systems integrator and the fifth in maintenance and support services.
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