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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jill who wrote (28562)	8/24/1999 9:16:00 AM
From: Teflon	Respond to of 74651

Sleeping with the enemy: Vendors promise more bang for buck with eight-ways By Michael Lattig InfoWorld Electric Posted at 6:40 AM PT, Aug 23, 1999 Compaq, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM will introduce their eight-way, 550-MHz Pentium III Xeon-based servers this week, promising enhanced processing power at little extra cost. The vendors hope the new hardware will help drive Intel-based servers running Windows NT and Windows 2000 into the enterprise, where they can compete with higher-end Unix machines. "This really gives us an opportunity to target customers that until now have focused their mission-critical computing on RISC-based machines," said Eric Cannell, product marketing manager at Dell. James Gruener, an analyst at the Aberdeen Group, in Boston, said the low price points and high performance could make the servers very attractive. More than simply relying on low price points, however, vendors will need to assuage users' concerns about the new machines' fault-tolerance capabilities. Now that the products are finally available after almost five months of waiting, the next step, Gruener said, will be to figure out where they fit in the enterprise. Vendors will then be able to develop optimized applications for the machines. All the vendors' eight-way offerings will be strikingly similar. The servers will be rack-optimized with a 7u form factor, and all four companies expect to ship in September. Pricing will span from the mid-$20,000s for bare-bones offerings to the $80,000 range for fully loaded eight-way machines. There will also be little variance in product names, with Compaq offering the ProLiant 8000 and 8500, Dell the PowerEdge 8450, HP the NetServer LXr 8500, and IBM the Netfinity 8500r. Compaq Computer Corp., in Houston, is at www.compaq.com. Dell Computer Corp., in Round Rock, Texas, is at www.dell.com. Hewlett-Packard Co., in Palo Alto, Calif., is at www.hp.com. IBM Corp., in Armonk, N.Y., is at www.ibm.com. Michael Lattig is an InfoWorld reporter. Teflon