Blue Cross And Blue Shield Selects NEC's Intel Itanium 2-Based Servers

NEC Solutions (America) has announced that Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Nebraska has selected one of the vendor's server lines to aid the insurer in streamlining its operations.

NEC's Express5800/1000 series of Intel Itanium 2 processor-based servers will be used in the company's effort to consolidate the insurer's existing environment and also to drive its data warehousing and business intelligence initiatives. The servers will be integrated into Blue Cross and Blue Shield's existing environment, which comprises HP, DEC Alpha and IBM systems. At first, the new systems will be used for enterprise data warehousing and business intelligence capabilities. Eventually, Blue Cross and Blue Shield aims to streamline its amount of overall hardware.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Nebraska has half a million members supported by a complex computing environment. The NEC Express5800/1000 Server Series are designed for enterprise use and technical computing applications. NEC has developed a high-performance chipset and crossbar switch, allowing the 1000 series to demonstrate high performance, high scalability and high reliability.

Models in this series can be configured with anywhere from 8 to 32 CPUs, which access up to 512 GB of shared main memory. Each of the CPUs can be partitioned at the hardware level, enabling each subsystem to operate as an independent system.