Indicating where its priorities lie, Digital Equipment Corp has introduced its first dedicated Alpha RISC Windows NT servers and is consolidating both the Alpha and Intel NT server product lines under a new Digital Server brand. The Prioris name for DEC’s WinTel servers is dropped, while the Digital Unix and OpenVMS lines remain unchanged and the price of existing Alpha-based NT servers is reduced by up to 43%. There are six new Intel servers ranging from a $2,000 233MHz Pentium II entry-level Digital Server 1200 to a new high-end eight-way 200MHz Pentium Pro Digital Server 9100 which uses the NCR Corp-developed OctaScale technology for linking Intel SHV quad-processor boards. The OctaScale-based enterprise server starts at $18,800. The 3300/3305 and 3300R/3305R servers use 400MHz and 500MHz Alpha 21164 CPUs and cost from $4,000. The 5000 application server series includes the model 5205 with one or two 300MHz Pentium IIs priced from $4,400. The Digital Server 5100, 5105 and 5200 are new names for the former Prioris HX line. The 5300 and 5305 use one or two 433MHz or 500MHz Alphas respectively and are priced from $8,000. The Digital Server 7000 uses up to four 200MHz Pentium Pro parts and costs from $8,800. The 7300 configurations use up to four Alpha CPUs and cost from $19,700. There’s no eight-way Alpha NT box. NetWare and SCO UnixWare also run on the Intel models. The servers are also offered as Ready-to-Go clusters with two nodes, a DEC RAID array, NT 4.0 with Cluster Server (Wolfpack) or DEC’s Clusters for NT priced from $28,400 for the 3000 series to $88,400 for the 7300. No word yet on when we’ll see DEC’s next-generation 600MHz 21264 EV6 Alpha chip which was due by the end of last year.
