Oki Electric designed the if Server TB series to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) while ensuring high speed, high reliability, and high availability in order to have the performance necessary to meet all kinds of needs, from department-level systems to mission-critical systems.
The main specifications of the if Server TB series are as follows:
- (1)High speed and reliability
- The TB series servers came with two 300 MHz Intel processors and ECC main memory and ECC secondary cache memory. They could also be structured with disk arrays to allow disk replacement without interrupting the system’s operations. These features ensured reliable, highly efficient data access and, thus, boosted the performance of server applications.
- (2)Reduced TCO
- The TB series was designed to reduce TCO by allowing the system administrator to monitor multiple networked PC servers from a single PC. This was possible because the servers aided system operation and management with fault management features, which monitored temperatures, voltages, and other hardware parameters and reported any signs of imminent faults to the administrator; performance management features, which monitored the load on the server during operations; and configuration management features, which read the configurations of the hardware making up the system.
- (3)Support for the newest operating systems
- To supply optimal solutions with excellent cost performance for the broad field of corporate IT systems, the TB series supported Microsoft Cluster Server, which was supplied with the latest Microsoft Windows NT Server, Enterprise Edition 4.0. This support further improved the availability and scalability of Microsoft NT Server systems and ensured automatic recovery of data and applications with a failover function in the event of faults.
- (4)Excellent scalability
- Even in the basic configuration TS series servers could be used to construct internal corporate systems, since they were standard equipped with 10BASE-T/100BASE-TX LAN connectivity, two Fast-Wide SCSI interfaces, and an onboard graphics controller. They also featured two ISA slots and five PCI slots and were supplied with five hot-swappable 3.5-inch drives.
Oki Electric announced the if Server TB series, loaded with Pentium II 300 MHz CPUs, in December 1997. In September 1998, however, Oki Electric agreed on the basis of a strengthening computer business partnership with Hewlett-Packard to expand into OEM PC server products alongside OEM UNIX products (servers, workstations, and related software). As a result, Oki Electric realigned its PC server series and announced the if Server LH3 series and the if Server LH3 series, which consisted of OEM products from HP. These series ran on a 400 MHz Pentium II chip. Oki Electric announced the if Server LXr8000 series and the LH4 series with 450 MHz Pentium II Xeon processors in February 1999. Oki Electric upgraded its PC server series in March 1999, using 500 MHz Pentium III Xeon chips in its if Server LXr8000 and LH4/LH4r series.
