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Technology Stocks : Compaq -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Duke of URL© who wrote (68061)	9/29/1999 5:27:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 97611

CPQ clearly intends to drive 8-ways to commodity status - their pricing model is set up to have 8-ways replace 4-ways as the high end volume offering. The Intel "lapdogs" have been shafted by Intel for the moment, but based on initial pricing, they are also relatively expensive. I don't think Intel saw the market the same way CPQ did and planned more profit into their offering. This has turned into a surprise windfall for CPQ but my sense is that they will stick to the volume pricing and drive share and mindshare. CPQ's products also seem to be a better design - people who have evaluated both CPQ's rackmount and stand-alone packages say that they have done a great job of ease of service, ease of upgrade and maintainability. The competing products are an "intermediate" offering which do not offer the density of the rackmount or the expandability of the stand-alone. CPQ is also the only vendor offering a built-in RAID controller as the standard controller, with enough disk slots even in the rackmount to do a full RAID boot disk with hot standby. THe other offerings use software-based SCSI mirroring, a lower-performance and less reliable alternative. None of the other rackmount packages has enough disk space to allow for a hot spare.