Digital Equipment Corp has announced the Digital Prioris HX family of personal computer servers in an attempt to establish itself at the high end of the personal computer server market, taking on Compaq Computer Corp and IBM Corp head-to-head. DEC has increased its share of the personal computer market over the last two years to the point where it is now the world’s fastest growing vendor in the market – personal computers now account for some 37% of its business – but until now sales have been mainly in the desktop and notebook markets. With the introduction of the server line, DEC feels it can now offer a complete range of products on all popular systems, as an increasing number of its existing VAX and Alpha customers also require personal computer networks. The Prioris HX server is a rack-mountable Intel Corp Pentium-based machine featuring DEC’s modular Power Scale architecture. It is the first such server to integrate a Peripheral Component Interface-to-Peripheral Component Interface bridge, with six PCI and six EISA slots, enabling users to use existing standard technologies as well as take advantage of the high-performance Peripheral Component Interface options. The Prioris HX systems are aimed at corporate customers running the network operating system of their choice and business-critical applications; the system has a variety of fault-tolerant features including a high-performance RAID controller. As the 90MHz Pentium is at the heart of the entry-level system and given the concerns about the Pentium bug, DEC is at pains to emphasise the three-year on-site warranty and Intel’s provision of a hotline for any problems that might occur. Robin Shuff of DEC’s Personal Computer Business Unit said the Pentium bug has been blown out of all proportion and was confident that Intel and DEC would be able to cope with any problems, suggesting that the furore was a disagreeable consequence of widespread Internet usage – the Soviet Union used to ban copiers to avoid such inconveniences. The base-level version of the Digital Prioris HX950 server is priced at UKP4,350, with the RAID version featuring two SCSI-2 1Gb drives costing UKP6,700; both are available now through DEC’s resellers. The Prioris HX590DP server with two 90MHz Pentiums and 32Mb of memory is at UKP6,300 and will follow in early 1995.
