Hitachi's North American arm has (insert knife-themed verb here) a fresh blade box meant for mid-sized businesses.

Those of you with medium builds can say "hello" to the BladeSymphony 320 – a 6U high chassis that holds 10 two-socket servers. Should those sockets be filled with Intel's quad-core Xeon chip, then you're talking bout 80 cores per chassis and 560 cores per standard 42U rack. Ah, how we remember the days when customers had to muddle along with a measly 84 cores per rack.

The BladeSymphony 320 arrives a few months after Hitachi's BladeSymphony 1000, which caters more to the large customer set, showed up on this continent.

The 320 starts at $10,000 with a very basic configuration that includes the chassis, power supplies and a single blade with an equally single dual-core chip. The server has been on sale in Japan since September.

Mid-sized firms could show particular interest in a 110-volt option with the 320. That will allow the systems to fit in just about any data center. ®

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