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ProLiant 5500 to Get 400-MHz Xeon Chip

Compaq's upcoming server line expands to four Xeon CPUs and 4GB of memory.

By Rebecca Sykes, PCWorld   

The enterprise-class ProLiant 5500 runs on the Windows NT, NetWare, Unix, and OS/2 operating systems and is designed for cost-conscious companies operating large applications, databases, messaging system, or large Web sites, according to Compaq. The ProLiant 5500 can be outfitted with up to four Pentium II Xeon 400-MHz chips, each with 512KB of second-level cache. It comes with 128MB of memory, expandable to 4GB.

The ProLiant 5500 with one Pentium II Xeon 400-MHz processor with 512KB of L2 cache and four 9.1GB hot-pluggable hard drives is priced at $11,701.

Intel accompanied the new chip with its own chip set optimized for powerful but inexpensive four-way servers. A number of ProLiant 5500's capabilities have been tweaked to work optimally with Xeon, according to Keith McAuliffe, vice president for corporate servers, at Compaq's Industry Standard Servers division.

"We're delivering a server that's not just a faster performer [but has] optimized additional features for Xeon such as the Smart Array," McAuliffe said, referring to the Smart Array 3200 Controller. Compaq boosted the ProLiant 5500's on-board accelerator cache from 16MB to 64MB, McAuliffe said. When this cache is used with Compaq's Wide-Ultra2 internal hard drives, the Smart Array 3200 Controller can achieve data transfer rates of up to 80MBps per channel, he said.