Acer America Corp, San Jose, California, is overhauling its AcerAltos server line, beginning at the low end and the middle of the range, and adding its first Peripheral Component Interconnect bus systems, which appear as the 90MHz Pentium 800/p and 7000/p, also both available with 100MHz Pentiums from March when it expects to get volume deliveries from Intel Corp. The uniprocessor 800/p replaces the existing 700/p as Acer’s entry-level AcerAltos system for up to 32 users. At $3,120 with no disk, or $3,750 with 1Gb, the company says, it is being aimed at a higher margin starting point. The 800/p comes with from 16Mb to 128Mb of memory, four EISA, two Peripheral Component Interconnect and one shared slot. The single or dual-processor 7000/p is available without disk at $5,190 – or $6,440 with a 2Gb disk with a single processor. It comes with from 32Mb to 256Mb RAM, four EISA, two Peripheral Component Interconnect and one shared slot. It replaces the 80486, and the 60MHz and 90MHz Pentium EISA systems. Acer says that the models up to the 7000 level represent two thirds of its revenue from the one-to-four-way server line. They run Santa Cruz Operation Inc Unix, NetWare, OS/2 and Windows NT and are certified for Solaris x86 and UnixWare. Also bundled is new Acer Server Manager software for NetWare and for Santa Cruz Unix, graphical environments for monitoring the server and subsystems. Santa Cruz Unix users also get Acer MirrorWare software for disk mirroring across a back-up system. Santa Cruz Unix does not get its new easy-to-use management technologies until the Santa Cruz Operation releases its new operating system, code-named Everest. Other Acer units, notably in Europe, are likely to offer similarly configured models within the next 60 days. Up its sleeve is a new high-end, four-way XAMP system that will supersede current 17000s (four-way 60MHz Pentium affairs) using a split transaction bus architecture that divides reads from writes for faster processing. The Intel Corp P6-ready system will use Pentiums initially and is slated to appear in the second half as a direct sales item. Acer says it has been picking up large NT orders from former minicomputer sites. Although this is not hurting its Unix business, they are sites that would presumably have plumped for Unix had NT not been around. Acer US’s Taiwanese parent is also looking for OEM customers for the PowerPC technology it is building as part of the New Taiwan PC Consortium.
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