Interop: Dell Preloads Server For Software Appliance Market - InformationWeek

With its sights put on white-box manufacturers, Dell on Monday introduced its first waiter built exclusively for the software system contraption market.

The CR100, introduced at the Interop conference in Las Vegas, is a 1U rack waiter that at 16 ins deep is littler than the typical rack server, Dell executive directors said. The decreased size is expected to be helpful to space-strapped little and midsize businesses, Dell's mark customer.

The new merchandise is a going for Dell in that it's the first waiter built from the land up as a software system appliance. Former merchandises were modified PowerEdge servers. "Dell have never come up out with a [special] waiter targeted at the software-appliance market," Crick Froehlich, VP of OEM merchandises at Dell's Industry Solutions Group, told InformationWeek.

What's unique about the chromium 100 is what Dell hasn't set into the product, Froehlich said. For example, there is no cadmium or DVD drive. Instead, the contraption offerings a USB port for mental image burden or other tasks, and the box makes not include high-end management software, such as as Dell's ain suite. "We only set in what the client needs," he said.

In this case, the client is contraption Sellers such as as McAfee, Secure Computing, and ConnectBeam. Starting at less than $700, the contraption is sold only to makers and not directly to IT departments. The contraption will transport the trade names of Dell customers, and will come up with two to three old age of support. Comparable Dell PowerEdge waiters sold to OEMs and corporate clients typically have got 12 to 15 calendar months of support.

In general, Dell anticipates the contraptions to be used mostly for e-mail, Web security, and substructure management, such as as for acceleration, monitoring, and management, Dave Pennington, director of Dell's Advanced Systems Group, said. Competitors are expected to be the many white-box makers edifice software system contraptions today.

The new merchandise is available with either a single Intel Core 2 Couple E4300 processor, an Intel Pentium dual-core E2160 chip, or an Intel Celeron. All three have got a front-side bus of 800 megahertz and caches of 2 MB, 1 MB, and 512 KB, respectively. The contraption also ships with the Intel 3200 chipset, and from 512 megabyte to 8 gilbert of DDR2 memory.

Maximum internal storage is 750 GB, which would dwell of three cabled 3.5-inch 250 gilbert SATA drives. The computing machine also back ups 80 gilbert 2.5-inch SATA thrusts and 160-GB 3.5-inch drives. Available operating systems include Microsoft Windows Waiter 2003, Red Hat Linux Enterprise, and Novell SUSE Linux.

Dell, which was displaced by Hewlett-Packard arsenic the world's biggest computing machine maker, is to recover marketplace share. Along with new waiters and other business-related products, the company is also targeting the consumer marketplace with new computers, including a mini-notebook that Dell but have declined to give details.