Dell on March 19 announced two new PowerEdge servers for the SMB market, but it declined to say what percentage would be sold through the channel and what percentage would be handled by Dell's direct sales force.

"The new PowerEdge Servers are focused on SMBs and there's also an enterprise play targeting branch offices," said Sally Stevens, director of Dell's PowerEdge Server group. While the SMB server business has gathered "huge momentum" for Dell, "we're not quoting specific channel percentages," she said.  "We're focusing on selling these through both the channel and direct."

The PowerEdge R300 rack server and PowerEdge T300 tower server are designed to address small and midsize businesses’ concerns about speed, reliability and security as well as cost concerns, said Barry Jennings, Dell's chief SMB researcher.

"These servers include features that you would typically find in systems designed for much larger enterprises," Stevens said, giving the new PowerEdge servers a competitive advantage in performance, high availability and security over other servers targeted for the SMB market.

Both servers are powered by the quad-core Intel Xeon x5460 processor, and both offer 24GB of memory to support memory-intensive applications, which Stevens said is three times the memory capacity of competing products from IBM or Hewlett-Packard.  Hot-plug hard drives and redundant power supplies will also appeal to SMBs looking for servers that offer high-availability features, Stevens said.

For more on Dell's SMB server announcement, click here.

The T300 and R300 also include TPMs (Trusted Platform Modules) to encrypt and secure data, a locked-down USB and a chassis intrusion switch for better physical security.

Dell said the new products will beat out rivals HP and IBM on performance, reliability and price, but it did not comment on Sun Microsystems' announcement that its new SMB solutions allow partners to develop technology solutions based on its open standards technology, including SunFire x64 and UltraSPARC-processor based servers. 

For more on the Sun's server news, click here.  

Stevens said that the PowerEdge R300 showed 26 percent better performance than the Hewlett-Packard DL320 G5p and 51 percent higher performance than IBM's System X 3250. The T300 tower server, she said, achieves 31 percent better performance than HP's ML310 G5 server and 51 percent better performance than the IBM System X 3200.

The T300 starts at $999 and the R300 is priced starting at $1249.  Both servers are available now to channel partners and direct customers.