AMAX Introduces New High-Performance Systems

James Huang, product manager of AMAX, said the new lineup includes PathScale InfiniPath clustering interconnect technology, which is used to boost performance in systems in 64-bit clusters.

“In order for us to grow and profit, we have to search for new customer segments,” Huang said. “HPC and supercomputing are ways for us to go into new markets. This year, our focus has been on high-end workstations and servers.”

In the last few years, HPC clusters have become increasingly common in the financial, energy, pharmaceutical and other markets. Huang said that AMAX has already installed a 20-to-30-node cluster for one customer, but the reach into the higher end of the enterprise is still relatively new for the company.

Among the new systems AMAX announced last week, to coincide with its presence at the Linux World conference in San Francisco:

•A 5U, eight-way server based on the AMD Opteron processor;

•A 5U dual Xeon server with 48 hot-swap drive bays, which can support up to 19 Tbytes of hot-swap SATA storage;

•A 1U, eight-bay Serial Attached SCSI server, with as much as 2 Gbps full duplex throughput, which AMAX says could function well in I/O-intensive server environments requiring high uptime;

•A 1U, 12.5-inch ultra short depth server system that is designed to run cooler and is built with an Intel Pentium 4 LGA 775 chip.

Final pricing will be based on the particular configurations ordered by customers, Huang said, but AMAX is seeking to be competitive with offerings from Round Rock, Texas-based Dell; Sun Microsystems, Mountain View, Calif.; Hewlett-Packard, Palo Alto, Calif., and other vendors.

Huang said AMAX is an Intel Premier Provider, and will partner with third-party software and clustering experts to further expand the company&'s offerings in clustering configurations. Going forward, the system builder will seek a presence in the supercomputing space and a greater presence in the HPC space, Huang said.