New Fujitsu Servers Cut Power, Heat For Cloud Or MSP Customers

Fujitsu America Wednesday unveiled a server architecture that separates the processing component from the power and cooling parts in order to cut operating costs, particularly in managed service or cloud computing environments.

Fujitsu's new Primergy CX1000 server was designed with the scale-out data center and cloud computing in mind, said Manuel Martull, senior director of server marketing at Fujitsu, Sunnyvale, Calf.

"We're talking a new server design with unprecedented scale-out and the latest in data center economics," Martull said.

That new design to which Martull referred puts 38 computing nodes in a single rack. Each node is a 1U server whose motherboard has two sockets for Intel's new Xeon 5600 Westmere processors. Each node also supports one or two SAS or SATA hard drives and dual Gigabit Ethernet connectors, and can be configured with 16 GB or 64 GB of memory.

However, those nodes do not have a power supply or a fan. Instead, the nodes are supplied from a common power supply, while two fans on top of the rack pull cool air through the server nodes and out the top, Martull said.

"The two redundant fans on top of the rack disperse heat upward, and not out the back," he said. "Now customers can put two racks back-to-back. The airflow for each mode is separate, with the air from all the nodes blown out the top."

The result, Martull said, is significant savings for MSPs, cloud computing providers or high-performance computing customers looking to build a large data center. It is also suited for use as a group of systems to support a specific group of applications, he said.

The Primergy CX1000 is sold as a fully configured system with a list price of $89,000, which Martull said was about 20 percent less expensive than standard servers with individual power supplies and fans.

Because of the design, the Primergy CX1000 also uses about 20 percent less power than standard servers. Also, by placing the racks back-to-back with the hot air blowing upward, customers can eliminate the hot aisle/cold aisle design, thereby cutting data center floor space by about 40 percent, he said.

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