Unisys Rolls Out Second High-end Intel Server
ES7000 gets an incremental improvement and a new name.
Unisys Corp. has refreshed its high-end "Wintel mainframe." The March release marks the first time Unisys has updated its mainframe product since launching the 32-processor server in 1999.
More than two years after it was introduced, the ES7000 line remains the only server capable of running Windows on more than eight Intel processors.
Unisys calls its new model the ES7000/200. The ES7000/200 overhaul adds support for the new micro-architecture of the "Foster," or Intel Xeon MP chips Intel released in April, and enhances system self-management and self-healing through a suite of technologies called Server Sentinel. The systems are available in configurations of up to 32 processors.
The company's original model, based on Unisys' own Cellular Multi-Processing (CMP) architecture, is called the ES7000. With its 1999 release, the ES7000 combined with Microsoft's Windows 2000 Datacenter Server heralded the arrival of Windows servers as an option for large-scale, glasshouse applications.
The new ES7000/200 is more an incremental improvement than a new generation of CMP servers. Unisys will introduce a new version of its CMP server to coincide with Intel's McKinley processor later this year.