Amax Shows Custom Barcelona, VMware, Home Server Solutions

System builder Amax Information Technologies plans to give its direct and indirect customers a peek at some upcoming products, including AMD Barcelona quad-core processor-based servers, virtual storage appliances, and a Microsoft Windows Home Server solution.

Amax on Thursday will preview a wide range of its new custom server and storage products to a group of its integrator and system builder customers, as well as to between 300 and 500 enterprise decision makers, said James Huang, product marketing manager for the Fremont, Calif.-based system builder.

About 50 percent of Amax's revenue comes from sales of its server and storage products directly to enterprise customers, while 30 percent comes from the distribution of components to other system builders and 20 percent from its contract manufacturing business, Huang said.

Shared server/storage devices are a big theme of Amax's customer event.

One highlight will be the showing of two-socket and four-socket quad-core Barcelona-based servers. This includes a Barcelona-based storage server with up to four socket and 16 cores as well as up to 15 Tbytes of internal hard drive capacity and up to 192 Gbytes of memory. "It is aimed at customers such as financial institutions and entertainment developers who do a lot of number crunching," Huang said

Amax will also show a new quad-core Xeon-based server with up to four sockets and 16 cores, 8 Tbytes of internal hard drive capacity, and up to 256 Gbytes of memory. Target buyers include Fortune-1000 customers and large data centers, he said.

Also being shown for the first time is a new six-node flexible server with shared storage, Huang said. The chassis has space for up to six blade servers which share up to 14 2.5-inch SATA hard drives. The blades do not have any integrated storage. It includes external iSCSI and SAS connectors for adding additional storage as needed. "The target is small and midsize customers to enterprises with computation-heavy applications that require flexible storage," he said.

Amax is also showing what Huang called the most powerful blade server system in the market. It supports up to 10 blade servers, each of which has either two quad-core Xeon or four quad-core Barcelona sockets. Each blade currently has space for up to two hard drives, but future versions will have room for up to six, he said.

Amax is also betting that the market for virtual storage appliances will start to develop.

To that end, the company will show a number of hardware appliances configured with VMware's Virtual Infrastructure 3 (VI3) suite and a storage virtualization software application, Huang said. Amax is currently testing the storage software from Munich, Germany-based Open-E, which turns industry-standard servers into SAN or NAS appliances, and will work with customers' preferred server and storage virtualization software, he said.

Nearly all of Amax's sales reps have been certified for VMware, and two of its engineers are certified to provide VMware technical support, Huang said. "We're a hardware manufacturer, but we want to expand into virtualization big," he said.

Amax will also show its first Microsoft Windows Home Server solution, a model based on the Intel Celeron processor on a Mini ITX mother board with four SATA connectors. Huang said customers will be able to order it with Intel's Pentium M, Celeron, Core 2 Duo, Core Duo, or Solo Core 2 Extreme processors; or AMD's Athlon 64, Athlon 64X2 Dual-core, or Sempron processors; or VIA processors.

The Amax showcase will also feature a new series of network appliances for OEM branding by ISVs, as well as a new line of embedded systems using Intel or VIA processors on Mini ITX, Pico ITX, and Nano ITX format motherboards.

All the products to be shown are available this week except the Windows Home Server solution, which Huang said should be available about October 1, and the six-node flexible server, which should be available in mid to late November.