NEC and Unisys have revealed the first fruits of their research collaboration by launching a high-end server.

The Express5800 Scalable HA Server is to be offered to enterprises in Japan initially and should be available in Europe some time next year although an NEC spokesman could not put an exact date on the launch.

The new server, with 96 core/16 processor capability, has been designed to offer mainframe class reliability and assist in large scale server consolidation. It will use Intel's new Dunnington six-core Xeon chipset. The new server has been aimed at tasks such as database-intensive activities, ERP and server consolidation.

NEC and Unisys signed a joint deal in 2006 in an attempt to reduce research and development costs. The NEC spokesman said that Unisys also brought access to markets outside Japan.

The previous incarnation of the Express 5800 was criticized for the high cost performance, being three times more expensive than the top-performing Dell machine. The NEC spokesman said that the company had not yet benchmarked the server so could not give any indication as to whether the cost performance would improve.