Data General Corp duly took the wraps off its SiteStak web server this week, an appliance designed simply to store HTML pages and shove ’em out on the web. Being single-minded about the device from the start has paid off – according to the ThiinLine division that spawned it – each $8,000 unit can store up to 160,000 HTML pages, and process up to 38m hits per day. The clever bit is that if you stack them up they find their peers in the cluster automatically. The SiteStak is aimed squarely at internet service providers ISPs, said to be cheaper, faster, smaller and neater than traditional servers. They are easily configured via a browser GUI, and adding a new web page can be performed with about three mouse clicks. The units achieve 450 SPECweb96, and one SPECweb per cubic inch. While the SiteStak can handle some kinds of animation it can’t serve Java applets, and the ThiinLine division says it doesn’t plan to add that functionality. DG showed the SiteStak off at ISPCon in San Francisco and had lots of interest, but didn’t actually make a sale.The division says it is working on a dedicated mail server along the same lines as its Thiin Server – due to be launched in the next couple of months. It had hoped to get the Thiin Server to market this month but as Tom West, SVP advanced development puts it, it’s the first time we’ve built one of these things and it’s taking a little longer than we’d hoped.
