Compaq Computer Corp is today announcing a raft of products that will plug the gaps in its mainstream server offering, bolster its storage family and offer low cost, easy to deploy clustering. It has introduced four new servers, the ProLiant 5500, 3000, 1600 and 1200, which range from a high-end, 4-way Pentium Pro-based high performance server to Pentium II-based workgroup machines. All the new servers ship as standard with high availability features such as hot pluggable disk drives and redundant power supplies, fans and network interface cards. The 5500 enterprise server, which will replace the existing ProLiant 5000, supports up to four 200Mhz Pentium Pro processors, with integrated 512Kb cache and up to 3Gb system memory. The 3000 departmental server is based on a 300 Mhz Pentium II and aimed at file and print, database and internet/intranet applications and the 1600 and 1200 are targeted as workgroup servers, the 1600 offering dual processing.
Fibre channel connected
On the storage front, Compaq says until quite recently it was not even on the storage radar but now claims to be second only to IBM Corp in local network storage market, with 40% of LAN storage. It sees a real opportunity in enterprise storage, and has launched its fibre channel-connected storage family, currently testing in more than 250 customer sites worldwide, which it says will be available in the first quarter of next year. It is also announcing a Wide-Ultra SCSI-3 10,000 RPM hard drive and the Model 35/70 DLT Digital Linear Tape Library, which claims to backup more than a terabyte of data in less than 10 hours. Combined with Computer Associates Inc Cheyenne ARCserve 6.5 software for Windows NT, up to 5 libraries can be combined in a ‘virtual’ library. Compaq says it will introduce a large number of new storage products over the next few months. Finally, Compaq is introducing what it claims is a clustering option that is low cost, easy to deploy and simple to set up. The ProLiant Cluster Series F will use fibre channel storage interconnects, and the ProLiant Cluster Series S, SCSI-based clustering, both of which will support Microsoft Cluster Server – the former Wolfpack. In addition, Compaq will offer NT clusters supporting Oracle Parallel Server and the Non-Stop SQL/MX database from its recent Tandem Computers Inc acquisition. Compaq currently offers only two-node clusters, but expects to offer 4 node clusters late next year, when the next release of Microsoft’s cluster software is available.
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