“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.”