"In a rarity for Silicon Valley these days, a start-up plans to announce today that it plans to go into the computer hardware business.
"Key Research, which has 15 employees in Palo Alto, has received $12.5 million in venture funding to make 64-bit servers that run the Linux operating system. Key's founders include three former Sun Microsystems engineers who felt there was a big opportunity in connecting a bunch of low-cost servers to handle the same tasks performed by supercomputers today.
"The small company will be going up against big names like IBM, SGI and Hewlett-Packard. Dell Computer is also expected to enter this segment of the market this year. But Key's team believes it can come up with a more cost-effective server..."
