【Mitsubishi Electric】Apricot FT8000 Series

Mitsubishi Electric announced the new Apricot FT8000 series of client-server computers in April 1996. The series included the FT8000/800, the first model in the world with eight Intel Pentium Pro processors, which were the state of the art at the time. The series also included the FT8000/400, which was expandable to four CPUs.

Mitsubishi Electric used the following architecture with the Apricot FT8000 series for faster processing speeds:

• Symmetric microprocessing with up to eight 200 MHz Pentium Pro processors
• The servers featured a 32-bit high-performance micro channel bus architecture (MCA) and seven expansion slots (four 32-bit slots and three 16-bit slots).
• The 800 model included a 4 MB system cache
• The architecture, which included a high-speed system bus (582 MB/s), a high-speed PCI bus (132 MB/s), and a Fast-Wide SCSI-2 HDD interface (20 MB/s), was designed to maximize the entire system’s throughput

Mitsubishi Electric added the following server designs to achieve the reliability needed for mission-critical business operations and large-scale networks:

• Online-swappable power-supply modules for easy expansion and redundancy
• Standard, built-in UPS
• RAID controllers with RAID 5 support, and automatic data recovery to disks after online-swapping
• Used ECC system bus and ECC memory

Main memory could be expanded to 1 GB and up to 44 GB of hard disk capacity could be housed within the servers. With expansion units, disk capacity could be increased to 228 GB. The servers had ten expansion slots.

Mitsubishi Electric outfitted the servers with advanced server control units with the following features:

• A specialized hardware unit independent of the main server hardware monitored and controlled the server hardware, collected error data, automatically reported data to a specified terminal, and controlled the server’s power supply. Remote maintenance was possible even when the server was off thanks to a special processor that operated from an independent power supply.
• A secure environment was assured with user authentication functions and callback functions as well as with the application of encryption technology to the authentication process when the server was remotely accessed from a management terminal.
• An automated scheduler could schedule when to turn the server on and off and which applications to run at system start-up.