Compaq Computer Corp is claiming to be the first major vendor to deliver dedicated appliance servers, with the immediate availability of its TaskSmart family in the US yesterday. The first in the new product line was the TaskSmart C-Series, optimized for internet cacheing. Rival Dell Computer Corp, through its OEM partnership with Network Appliance Corp, began selling its first files servers back in April.
Compaq, which earlier this year went to Novell Inc for cacheing software technology to run on the appliances (CI No 3,618), says the system will deliver big performance gains which translate into WAN bandwidth savings, improved response times and greater scalability for web server farms. It can increase web response times by a factor of ten, and clustered for high availability, Compaq said. Pricing begins at $10,000, with three models, the C1200R, C1500R and C2000R, available immediately. A fourth model, the C2000R, will be out later this month.
