Dell Releases Blade Servers
Joins HP and Compaq
Joining the ranks of Compaq Computer Corp. and Hewlett Packard Co., Dell Computer Corp. became the latest major OEM to release a blade server product Wednesday. It also offered details on its future enterprise strategy.
Hosting a press and analyst event in New York, the Round Rock, Texas-based company took the wraps off of its 1655MC blade servers, which fit up to 6 2-way blades into a 3U enclosure. Dell expects to ship the servers in the third quarter 2002.
Each server blade sports 2 1.26 Pentium III processors, up to 2GB of RAM, and two SCSI hard drives. Compaq and Hewlett Packard’s blade products are single-processor machines, although Compaq said it would develop 2-way versions of its blade design.
Dell also revealed it was developing a “brick”-style server architecture, which combine SMP CPU units with external I/O units to give enterprises more flexibility with the Intel architecture. IBM Corp. has already released its own “brick” product, the x440.
Speaking at the event, Dell’s president and COO Kevin Rollins was bullish on the prospects of Intel machines of replacing mainframes and traditional Unix systems in the enterprise. “Standards-based systems will become commonplace in the Datacenter,” he said.
About the Author
Chris McConnell is Product and Technology Editor for Enterprise Systems.