In a frontal assault on Compaq Computer Corp, Hewlett- Packard Co is supposed to introduce a cheap new server family aimed at self-supporting small and mid-sized companies today, Monday, writes our sister publication ClieNT Server News. The first of the Pentium-based systems, formally called the NetServer E Series and internally referred to as the MIS-less series, carries an entry-level $1,907 price tag for a 133MHz diskless E30 Model 1 with 16Mb of ECC RAM expandable to 192Mb. With 2 gigs of storage, it’s $2,420. The same configurations with a 166MHz chip are $2,159 and $2,681 respectively. The SCSI-based mass storage can expand to 21Gb. HP believes Dell is premature in using Pentium Pros in its new servers. Its E Series will go to the P6 after Intel knocks down prices in November. Some HP insiders described the E Series as a skunkworks project put together in six months. It’s distinctly a channels product aimed at first-tier resellers like Merisel and MicroAge and HP’s contingent of second-tier VARs. Hence the E Series is set up for them to add value such as the operating system forecast to be at least 50% NT in North America and 20% in the rest of the world although that has been the historic ratio between NT and NetWare and not likely to survive into the future as NT displaces NetWare more and more. HP aims to carve out what Network Server Division worldwide marketing director Duncan Campbell calls awesome mindshare with the channel, something it obviously intends to exploit as HP, the corporation, treads deeper and deeper into NT territory. It has set the E Series warranty, for instance, at a year rather than the usual three years so VARs can make an incremental sale and at the same time trim HP’s costs. Moving the iron through third parties is of course itself an economy. Campbell claimed HP’s margins on the boxes, which he declined to quantify, were better than [its] desktop margins which by report wouldn’t be hard to beat. He also claimed that HP would only countenance profitable market share. He made it perfectly clear that HP aims to be number one at the low-end of the server market, selling initially in the thousand a month, whatever that means. HP has bundled a number of tools with the E Series in an attempt to take any pain out of installation, backup, restart, management and troubleshooting. It believes it will capture the business that has been going to desktops that have been turned on their sides to act as servers. It also believes that, unlike Dell, it will capture return business because it is using channels as the delivery mechanism. The machines, which include six slots, two PCI, two shared and two ISA, ship in volume October 1. HP is also offering an optional low-end tape backup system called SureStore priced at $430 that can handle 4Gb native storage and 8Gb compressed.
