Compaq Computer Corp claimed late Friday to have won the race to bring the first servers to the market containing production quality Pentium II Xeon processors, beating rivals Dell Computer Corp. Compaq said it is now shipping ProLiant 7000 and 6000 servers with 400MHz Xeon processors in volume. Demand for the new servers had been high, said the company, but it had been awaiting resolution from Intel that identified ECC related errata had been corrected, and that our customer’ data integrity is not at risk. All servers using four processors were affected. Intel had hoped to have the first four-way servers shipping on June 29th, until a bug in the supporting 450NX chipset was identified a week before (CI No 3,438). Intel’s revised shipment date, July 17th, was also not met due to a further bug in the error correcting code, discovered while the first was being fixed (CI No 3,459). Dell had hoped to be the first to market. Compaq claimed its new 7000 ProLiant set a new record of supporting 15,000 simultaneous MAPI e-mail users running Microsoft Exchange, surpassing the previous record of 13,800 achieved on an eight way HP Lxr Pro-8 server.
