Data General Corp is taking its Pentium Pro AViiON servers further downstream with three more departmental servers that seem significantly cheaper than alternatives from its competitors. The new trio comprises the AV 1600 and AV 2600 towers and the AV 3600R rack-mounted server. The AV 1600 comes with a 200MHz Pentium Pro and up to 512Mb RAM, with Super VGA, UltraSCSI and 10/100Mbps local network controllers on the motherboard. It costs from $3,900. The AV 2600 supports one or two 200MHz Pentium Pros and up to 1Gb RAM, and adds redundant power and cooling. It supports RAID 0, 1 and 5 with up to 10 hot swap disks and is from $8,100. The AV 3600R can be configured with up to three quad- processor 200MHz Pentium Pro boards in a single 73 rack cabinet and costs from $13,300. Data General’s AV/Alert or NT/Alert automated problem detection software can be used with each server, depending on operating system. All models in the series – there are AV 4900 and AV 5900 PentiumPro quads and AV 5800 eight- way Pentium boxes at the higher end of the PC server space – can run DG/UX, SCO UnixWare, SCO OpenServer, NetWare and NT. DG is also offering Citrix Systems Inc’s eponymous WinFrame extensions to Windows NT on the Intel-based AViiONs (DG still sells 88000 RISC-based AViiONs too). WinFrame allows users to access NT from heterogeneous desktop environments and supports 15 concurrent users per CPU. It costs from $6,000 for a 15 user license.
