Hitachi Ltd. has released details on its plans to in the second half of the year start shipping servers and workstations powered by Intel Corp.'s Itanium processors. The forthcoming processors are Intel's first 64-bit chips based on its IA-64 architecture.
Hitachi's IA-64 offerings will range from workstations to 32-way servers and cluster systems featuring mainframe technologies, the Japanese computer maker said in a statement.
Featuring multiple operating system technologies, the high-end servers are designed to meet the increasing demand for reliability, availability and lower cost of ownership resulting from the new Internet-centric business environment, Hitachi said.
Workstations based on the IA-64 architecture will ship with advanced graphics capabilities for use in Internet-oriented engineering, finance and design sectors, the company said.
Hitachi's Itanium-based server line, meanwhile, will include low-end 2-way and 4-way servers, scaling up to 8-way and 32-way servers designed around the company's own chip sets. The 32-way model incorporates advanced SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) technologies to provide high scalability, Hitachi said.
Engineers from Hitachi have worked closely with their counterparts at Intel's Enterprise Technology Center in DuPont, Washington on the implementation of the 4-way Itanium processor server chipset, according to the statement.
The company is also planning to release cluster systems based on the InfiniBand architecture developed by an industry group led by Intel, Microsoft Corp. and five server vendors. Hitachi will incorporate multiple operating systems on one server using logical partitioning in order to lower total cost of ownership by allowing such servers to be load-balanced and offer better consolidation, the company said.
In anticipation of the release of the first IA-64 systems, Hitachi has also strengthened its partnerships with operating system vendors as well as independent software and hardware vendors, Hitachi said.
Hitachi, in Tokyo, can be contacted at +81-3-3258-1111, or at http://www.hitachi.co.jp/. Intel, in Santa Clara, California, is at +1-408-765-8080, or at http://www.intel.com/.