New Tatung-branded servers hit the market

HANOVER, GERMANY - Tatung Co. has launched three new servers at the Cebit trade fair here in Hanover, Germany, and is pushing the products under its own name as well as supplying them to be rebranded by other vendors.

Two 64-bit rackmount servers have been developed with dual Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) Opteron processors in a 1U rack mounted size. They have 1M byte of level 2 cache and an integrated memory controller, as well as support for two 3.5-inch (88.9 millimeters) hard drives.

The TS-1881-K01 supports up to 16G bits of ECC DDR (error correction code double data rate) memory and two hot swap SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) disk drives, plus a CD-ROM drive, two PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) expansion slots, dual gigabit Ethernet and RAID (redundant array of independent disks) support.

The other server, called the TS-1881-K02, has similar specifications but has two ATA (Advanced Technology Attachment) disk drives and does not offer RAID support. These servers are aimed at high-end users in the life sciences, nanotechnology and clustering markets, the Taipei company said.

The third product, the TUD-4010, is an ultra-dense blade server that Tatung says accommodates up to 10 independent dual processor server blades, two switch blades and two management blades with failover capabilities in a 4U chassis. The server can accommodate up to 200 Intel Corp. Xeon processors per rack, the company said.

Tatung is still selling about 95 percent of its products to other companies, as it only started marketing under the Tatung brand last year, Benelux sales representative Jurjen van der Krieke said Friday.

The company will configure products to order under the Tatung name, and is aiming to price its products at just under those of Dell Corp., while offering a similar quality, he said.

Tatung also hopes to win business because of its support offering: three years onsite support, with a 24 hour fix-time promise or, for a "small amount" users can upgrade to a four-hour response service, with an eight-hour fix promise, van der Krieke said.

The Tatung branding for servers was first attempted in the Netherlands, because Tatung has a manufacturing factory there and the name is therefore known, he said. Tatung has also sold LCD (liquid crystal display) screens in the U.K., he said. It is now taking the Tatung brand name into those two countries plus Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany and France.

Pricing for the TUS-4010 will start at $9,980 for a system with two server blades (dual 2.4GHz/533 LV Xeon processors, 512 M bit memory and 40G bit hard disk drive), one switch blade, one management blade and one power supply module, Tatung said. Van der Krieke did not have pricing for the other two products.