Small and midsize businesses continue to get the attention of major OEMs, who are offering upgraded systems targeted at the increasingly coveted customers.
IBM on Thursday will unveil upgraded single-processor tower and rack-optimized servers that include such standard features as simple-swap serial ATA drives, integrated IBM ServerRAID 7e RAID-1 capabilities for mirroring the hard drive, and the ability to power on and power off the systems remotely.
IBM’s release comes two days after Hewlett-Packard Co. unveiled the first system in its ML100 line of ProLiant systems for SMBs, and a couple of weeks after Dell Inc. rolled out two single-processor servers.
IBM’s eServer xSeries 206 tower configuration and 306 rack-optimized server will offer the latest 3.2GHz Pentium 4 chip from Intel Corp. that includes 800MHz front-side bus, said Stuart McRae, manager of xSeries products.
Earlier this week, HP, of Palo Alto, Calif., unveiled the ML110, the first system in its new ML100 series available globally and designed to give SMBs server functionality for the price of a desktop.