SUNNYVALE, Calif., Dec 17 -- Platform Solutions, Inc. (PSI), developer of Open Mainframe Servers, and NEC Corporation of America, a premier provider of IT, network and identity management solutions, today announced the two companies have entered into an agreement for PSI to market and resell NEC's Express5800/1000 series server and D-Series storage technology for enterprise datacenters. When combined with PSI's Open Mainframe Server technology, customers can consolidate IBM z/OS, Microsoft Windows, and Linux in a single managed server bringing new levels of consolidation to the datacenter.

The first company to offer Open Mainframe servers, PSI combines Intel Itanium 2 processor technology and plug compatible mainframe systems architecture. PSI Open Mainframes provide choice and flexibility for enterprise customers operating in a mixed mainframe and server environment.

The third-generation NEC Express5800/1000 series servers amplify the capability of the Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 processor. Leveraging NEC's supercomputing and mainframe technology, such as low latency and high performance memory and crossbar interface, the Express5800/1000 series servers are designed to meet the needs of the high-end server market and offer the performance and reliability that enterprises require for mission critical operations. The Express5800/1000 line of Itanium servers scale from 2 to 64 processors cores, 8 to 64 PCI-X or PCI-Express slots, and up to one terabyte (TB) of memory.

NEC's Express5800/1000 is unique in its combination of mainframe-class characteristics and broad support of industry and open systems standards. The Express5800/1000 brings reliability, availability, serviceability (RAS) characteristics such as dynamic hardware partitioning, hot CPU additions, automated failover and recovery, memory mirroring, and dynamic serviceability to distributed system platforms, like Linux, Windows, and UNIX.

NEC's D-Series storage arrays are designed to provide enterprise performance, connectivity, capacity and availability without the high initial cost of high-end enterprise systems. The D-Series can start as small as one TB or less and scale non-disruptively to over 1.1 petabytes (PB). With support for high availability features like RAID Triple Mirror, RAID 6 double parity, and double mirrored cache, I/O performance is maintained in the event of disk or memory failures.

"NEC has a rich history of manufacturing mainframe-class technology and provides PSI with a perfect platform for delivering to customer's mainframe and open technology in a single platform," said Mike O'Hara, EVP Sales at PSI. "Datacenters looking to consolidate legacy and distributed applications on a single high availability platform can benefit from this technology."

"As the first vendor to introduce an Itanium-based mainframe modernization platform, NEC is proud that PSI has selected the NEC Express5800/1000 series server as their platform for mainframe-class, open system choice," stated Mike Mitch, General Manager for enterprise servers, IT Platform Group of NEC Corporation of America. "Combined with PSI's technology and enterprise knowledge, datacenters now have a new choice in terms of open system mainframe-class infrastructure."

About NEC Corporation of America

NEC Corporation of America is a leading technology provider of network, IT and identity management solutions. Headquartered in Irving, Texas, NEC Corporation of America is the North America subsidiary of NEC Corporation. NEC Corporation of America delivers technology and professional services ranging from server and storage solutions, IP voice and data solutions, optical network and microwave radio communications to biometric security, virtualization and digital cinema solutions. NEC Corporation of America serves carrier, SMB and large enterprise clients across multiple vertical industries. For more information, visit www.necam.com.

About PSI

Platform Solutions, Inc. develops Open Mainframe Servers compatible with the broadest set of datacenter environments and operating systems. The new PSI systems are based on proven systems architecture spun-off from Amdahl Corporation and industry standard Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 processor technology, and provide customers true choice and flexibility in mainframe computing. Based in Sunnyvale, Calif., the privately held company was launched in 2003 and is funded by Blueprint Ventures, Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS), Intel Capital (NASDAQ: INTC), InterWest Partners, InvestCorp (LSE: INVBQ) and Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ: MSFT). For more information, visit www.platform-solutions.com.

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Source: NEC Corporation of America; Platform Solutions, Inc.