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Dell is releasing a pair of servers with Intel chip technology that comparable servers from competitors don't yet feature, offering small and medium-size business customers more powerful systems.

The new servers, available Monday, are the PowerEdge 600SC and PowerEdge 2600. Both feature higher processor speeds and better input/output performance over the systems' Dell predecessors and over similar servers from competitors.

"These systems have the next generation bus architecture and processors from Intel that most of the vendors will come out with shortly," said Mark Melenovsky, an IDC research director. "Dell has hit that segment first with the new refresh of products."

The PowerEdge 600SC is a one-processor tower server aimed at small and medium-size businesses. It uses either Intel's Celeron or Pentium 4 chips, with pricing for the P4 model starting at $799. The larger PowerEdge 2600 can house two Xeon processors and is priced starting at $1999. It comes with several redundant components that make it more attractive to large companies, said Russ Ray, senior product manager for Dell PowerEdge servers.

Configuration Options

The systems will ship with Microsoft's Windows 2000 server operating system or Red Hat's Linux distribution.

The PowerEdge 600SC is available immediately with a Celeron processor running at 1.7 GHz or with a Pentium 4 processor running at 1.8 GHz or 2.4 GHz, Ray said. The system uses the ServerWorks GC-SL chip set with a 400-MHz front side bus, which provides a nice jump over the 500SC's 133-MHz front side bus with a Pentium III processor. The additional processing power and throughput boost overall system performance by a large margin over Dell's current 500SC server, Ray said.

The server will also ship with up to 4GB of memory, five PCI slots, and four hard disk drives. Dell will offer both 120GB IDE and 73GB SCSI drives with PowerEdge 600SC in a RAID configuration.

Dell has started selling the new PowerVault 100T Travan40 internal tape drive as an add-on to this server. The drive starts at $399 and offers up to 40GB of capacity with software compression, Ray said.

The higher-end PowerEdge 2600 will ship with up to two Xeon processors running at 1.8 GHz, 2 GHz, 2.2 GHz, or 2.4 GHz and with up to 6GB of memory. The system houses up to eight SCSI hard drives and comes with redundant, hot-plug power supplies and fans.

Early Applause

One user said the option of using SCSI drives in a RAID configuration, large amounts of memory, and a faster front side bus make the system a true server as opposed to just a beefed-up PC.

"It's not a glorified desktop in that it has upgrade options," said Arturo Castellanos, director of Web services at online travel company GeoPassage, in Austin, Texas. "The limiting factor with a desktop is that once you configure it, you are stuck." Castellanos said that "bang for buck" the server appeared to be a good buy.

"This server fits into the upper end for small and medium businesses and is the starting point for many enterprises," said Dell's Ray. The server can handle file and print serving tasks as well as higher-end software like enterprise databases.

Both of the new servers hit the sweet spot of Dell's business where it has been able to gain market share against competitors such as Hewlett-Packard and IBM, analyst Melenovsky said.

"These new products further their penetration in the small and medium business segment," Melenovsky said. "They really pegged this spot in 2001 when they saw the enterprise market collapsing."

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