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Gateway Inc. will announce this week three servers that executives said are faster, more expandable and more reliable than Gateways current units.
The 920 Series, 960 Series and 980 Series servers are upgrades from Gateways 910 Series and 930 Series, which have Intel Corp.s older Celeron and Pentium III processors. Also, the new models have toolless drive bays, power supplies and expansion slots.
The 910 model was due for an upgrade, and the 930 model has too broad an audience, being overkill for many users, said Sam Salem, manager of server products at the Poway, Calif., company. The 920 Series, for small businesses, is available this week starting at $599, with Pentium 4 and Celeron options. Its memory starts at 128MB of synchronous dynamic RAM, with seven drive bays, five PCI slots and up to 120GB hard drives at 7,200 rpm or an 18GB SCSI drive at 10,000 rpm, and a 250-watt power supply.
The 960 Series, for workgroups, and the 980 Series, for critical applications, have dual Intel Xeon 1.8GHz processors, with up to 2.4GHz supported, plus 256MB of double data RAM and six PCI slots, four of which use PCI-X connectivity technology. Both have 18GB, 36GB and 73GB SCSI hot-swappable hard drives at 10,000 rpm, with dual channel controllers or RAID controllers, and both come in tower or 5U (8.75-inch) rack designs. Both will ship next week.
The 960 Series starts at $1,499, with eight drive bays, four of which are hot-swappable, and one 450-watt power supply. The 980 Series has 12 drive bays for up to 620GB of storage, eight with hot-swap capability, and dual 450-watt power supplies. The servers ship with Gigabit Ethernet cards, Hewlett-Packard Co.s OpenView ManageX Event Manager, Microsoft Corp.s Small Business Server 2000 and Windows 2000. They also have a 400MHz bus and 4GB of RAM.
The Brickman Group Ltd., a commercial landscaping company in Langhorne, Pa., runs seven Gateway servers and supports desktop machines in 100 branch offices nationwide and upgrades several times a year.Warren Heins, Brickmans information resources manager, said that he had looked into servers from Dell Computer Corp. but that Gateway was better on price and service.”I dont want to deal with more than one vendor at a time,” Heins said.
A 940 Series server designed as a value dual-Xeon model will ship by early next year.