Tokyo, July 9, 2007 - NEC Corporation today announced the launch of a new NEC Express5800/ft series fault-tolerant server featuring up to two Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® Processors. The latest ft series model, 320Fc-MR, is the first server product designed under the joint development agreement signed by NEC and Massachusetts-based Stratus Technologies, Inc. in November 2005.

The NEC Express5800/320Fc-MR will first go on sale in Japan and North America on July 9, 2007, followed by Asia Pacific market launch at a later date.

In addition to enhancing its GeminiEngine chipset that NEC designed to ensure lockstep processing in redundant components, the 320Fc-MR features up to two Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® Processor X5355 and a 1333MHz front side bus (improved from 1066MHz in the previous models), achieving up to five times the processing power of the previous single-core processor models.

Supporting Microsoft® Windows Server® 2003, Enterprise Edition, the 320Fc-MR is also the first ft series model to support Red Hat Enterprise Linux v.4. This allows a wide range of open-source applications to run on Red Hat Linux in the high-availability fault-tolerant server.

Furthermore, the 320Fc-MR features Active Upgrade™ to minimize system downtime associated with update activities. The new software product enables the user to install update modules or operating system-related security patches without rebooting the system.

NEC’s fault-tolerant servers address planned and unplanned downtime through its dual modular architecture, which enables the active and physically replicated modules to process the same instructions simultaneously. The replicated modules include CPU, memory, I/O components, hard disk drives, power supply and cooling fans. In the event of a hardware failure, the replicated module continues normal operation, ensuring transparent failover and system integrity. The faulty module is separated automatically, but there is no need to interrupt system operation during replacement.

In recent years, an increasing number of corporations are calling for operational stability to minimize the risk of business disruption due to hardware failures, along with high-speed processing capabilities to handle a massive amount of data.

Providing high processing power and reliability, the NEC Express5800/320Fc-MR is the optimum choice for enterprise customers - from Web service providers to medium-sized corporations running mission-critical systems and data centers with management servers running around the clock.

Based on NEC’s new IT platform vision, “REAL IT PLATFORM”, the 320Fc-MR has been designed not only to offer ultimate availability through its hardware redundancy, but also to deliver enhanced system continuity and cost performance, along with high computing power.