COMMERCIAL NEWS
Tokyo, JAPAN — NEC Corporation (NEC) announced that it has signed an agreement with Hewlett-Packard Company (HP) in which HP will OEM and sell NEC’s 16-way server based on Intel’s Itanium processor. This server, code named AzusA, will become a part of the HP9000 enterprise server family and run HP’s enterprise UNIX operating system, HP-UX.
In addition, NEC and HP will collaborate on enhancing features of HP-UX on AzuzA, specifically in the areas of performance optimization and diagnostics. “HP is excited about extending our longstanding alliance with NEC, said Scott Stallard, vice president and general manager of Hewlett-Packard’s Business Systems and Technology Organization. “Our partnership benefits both companies. AsusA will provide scalability superior to any other Itanium server and will enhance our leadership family of enterprise Unix servers.”
NEC’s IA-64 servers have superior performance and are competitively priced. NEC’s strategy is to focus on the development of servers based on Intel’s Itanium family of processors as it considers IA-64 to be the mainstream processor for open server platforms in the future. NEC’s IA-64 servers will provide high performance and high reliability and are backed by the company’s expertise in developing leading-edge mainframes and supercomputers.
HP excels in its mission critical UNIX and IA-64 architecture technologies and is further driving its IA-64 leadership through this partnership with NEC.
“This is a very important step forward in NEC-HP alliance, “said Kazuhiko Kobayashi, senior vice president of NEC Solutions, an in-house company of NEC Corporation. “With NEC’s server technology and HP’s UNIX/IA-64 technology, both companies can now drive further the IA-64 strategy to expand the HP-UX leadership in the forthcoming IA-64 UNIX market. With HP’s distribution to its customer base, we expect shipments of NEC’s AzusA server to expand to the global market.”
The AzusA server employs the next generation Intel Itanium processor and an NEC chipset that will provide optimum performance with the 16CPU Itanium processor server. AzusA, the world’s leading 16-way Itanium server, is the first server with proven capabilities to scale beyond four Itanium CPUs.
In 1995, NEC formed an partnership with HP in large-scale UNIX server solutions. Since that time, the alliance has expanded to include an OEM agreement of HP’s HP900 enterprise server line, joint development of server hardware and HP-UX, including IA-64 support in the mission-critical area.
NEC Corporation is a leading provider of Internet solutions, dedicated to meeting the specialized needs of its customers in the key computer, network and electron device fields through its three market-focused in-house companies: NEC Solutions, NEC Networks and NEC Electron Devices. For further information, please visit the NEC home page at: http://www.nec-global.com .
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