By Ramdas S, CRN, November 22, 2011, 1000 hrs
Fujitsu India is betting on the changing dynamics in the Indian UNIX server market, which it hopes will help sales of its Primequest range of high end servers.
“Till two years back, there were three prominent players in UNIX server space. Oracle's acquisition of Sun has certainly put doubts in minds of customers. Similarly, Oracle announcing lack of support for Itanium means there is cause of concern for HP Unix customers. We admit IBM is still going strong, but customers need a choice, and they need more open standards,” said Pallab Talukdar, CEO, Fujitsu India.
Fujitsu which launched Primequest servers in the country last week, plans to break into territories which have been dominated so far by the non-x86 UNIX servers. The market is not small in the country, and during FY2010-11 was estimated to be around $250 million by IDC India.
Primequest servers which are essential modular 8 way server based on Intel Xeon e7 processors, with four electrically separated partitions, offers scalability of between 512GB and 1TB of memory for every partition. It comes with 100 percent redundancy for every component, a feature found in main frames and high end UNIX servers.
“The biggest savings which an enterprise would have would be on licensing costs. 80 percent of software that runs of servers of this class are from Oracle and SAP, and the processor core factor on x86 is definitely cheaper for a user. Cost of hardware is insignificant when you look at licensing costs, and the incremental maintenance costs that works out to be about 18 percent,” explained Talukdar.
He said that biggest advantage is the fact that the platform is x86, which essentially means that any software meant to run on an Intel or AMD server would run comfortably.
“Customers are looking to break free from the proprietary UNIX space. With uncertainty surrounding two of the large vendors, they are increasingly favoring options on the x86 platform. The latest range of Primequest servers are designed along with Intel, and we are hoping that Indian channels and customers would accept the product,” Talukdar said. |