Word on the grapevine is that IBM Personal Computer Co’s iAPX-86-based server business is to be dumped unceremoniously into the RS/6000 business, but in the meantime, IBM yesterday launched a low-end server for small business customers with five to 50 clients. It comes in two versions, the IBM PC Server 486DX2/66 and the PC Server Pentium 60MHz; ships start in three weeks. The smaller model is $2,500 without a disk (which makes it pretty useless as a server) and from $3,100 with 728Mb. The larger one starts at $5,000 with a 1Gb disk drive. IBM also unveiled a new version of its NetFinity hardware management application for local and remote management of servers, desktop and mobile systems. Out in July, NetFinity 2.0 is $850 with one copy of NetFinity Services; additional copies of NetFinity Services are $115.
