NEC Servers Offer "On Demand" Scalability and Serviceability for Mission Critical Data Centers Running Microsoft SQL Server 2008

NEC Earns Dynamic Partitioning Qualification for Microsoft Windows Server 2008

Santa Clara, Calif.- NEC Corporation of America, a premier provider of IT, network and identity management solutions, today announces that the NEC Express5800/1320Xf running Microsoft SQL Server® 2008, brings budget-friendly mainframe-class performance, functionality and high availability to mainstream IT operating environments. The Microsoft certified NEC Express5800/1320Xf is also the industry’s only server qualified by Microsoft for dynamic hardware partitioning functionality on Microsoft Windows Server® 2008.

“We are excited to see our industry partners, such as NEC, build on the technologies made available with the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 release,” said Dan Neault, general manager, SQL Server Marketing at Microsoft Corp. “This NEC solution helps offer dynamic partitioning, as well as on-demand scalability and serviceability, for Microsoft SQL Server environments while delivering mission critical capabilities to our valuable joint customers.”

The NEC Express5800/1320xf provides Intel® Itanium®-based mainframe-class scalability for Windows Server 2008 running mission critical workloads. The capability of on-demand resources combined with the benefits of dynamic partitioning (DP) on Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008, currently only available on the Itanium-based NEC Express5800/1320xf server, provides new enterprise Windows/SQL database options.

“NEC is proud to work collaboratively with Microsoft in our push to bring mainframe platform functionality to mainstream Windows environments,” said Mike Mitsch, general manager, Enterprise Server Division, NEC Corporation of America. “NEC is excited to be the first system provider to provide a solution that delivers on-demand scalability and mainframe class dynamic partitioning capabilities for Microsoft SQL Server. This solution delivers unsurpassed SQL scalability for enterprises of any size. While continuing to collaborate closely with Microsoft, NEC looks forward to bringing enterprise SQL customers value through innovative and serviceable solutions.”

Currently benchmarked at 1,126 tpcE and $2,771.79/tpcE, the NEC Express5800/1320Xf enterprise server, with NEC S2500 storage, is among the top Microsoft SQL Server 2008 performance leaders as benchmarked by the independent third party Transaction Processing Council.

In addition, in combination with the dynamic hardware partitioning functionality available in Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008, NEC’s Express 5800/1320Xf is the only mainframe-class server that provides the ability to actively add memory, processor and I/O devices, and to move CPU resources across hardware partitions without service interruption within a Windows environment.