Guild Companies

Last week, Hewlett-Packard revamped the low-end of its ProLiant server line to add new Intel processor and other technologies and to provide better bang for the buck as it competes against IBM, Dell, and others in the Wintel and Lintel server market. Like products from other server vendors, the theme behind the new ProLiants is doing more with less--meaning more work for less money, something that is in short supply in many IT budgets these days.

There is one new uniprocessor ProLiant machine and two new two-way machines. These are not the densest machines that HP sells, but they probably have the best expansion room and processing power that HP delivers in this entry price class.

The ProLiant ML310 is the first machine from either HP or Compaq, which it acquired in May, that uses Intel's "Williamette" Pentium 4 desktop processor. Being a volume product, the Pentium 4 chip is among the least expensive chips that Intel makes, and at its 2 GHz or 2.2 GHz clock speed used in the ML310, it has more than enough power to do the kinds of print, file, Web, and email serving jobs that entry servers often end up performing in business settings. It has enough oomph to function as an entry application and database server as well, provided that not too many users are hammering away at it. The ML310 server is a 5U server that uses the ServerWorks Grand Champion-SL chipset, which supports one processor, up to 4 GB of main memory, four 64-bit/33 MHz PCI slots, and a 400MHz frontside bus. The base ML310 comes with 128 MB of memory and a 40 GB IDE drive (expandable to a total of 364 GB of data storage in five disk bays) for a cost of $1,199.

HP has tweaked the ProLiant ML350 server with its third-generation configuration. The ML350 G3 has a 5U form factor and is based on the ServerWorks grand Champion-SC chipset. It uses Intel's "Prestonia" Pentium 4 Xeon processors running at 2 GHz or 2.2 GHz. These chips have 512 KB of integrated L2 cache memory for speeding performance, and they support two-way symmetric multiprocessing. The CG-SC chip supports a 400 MHz frontside bus, up to 8 GB of main memory, and five PCI slots (four 64-bit/100 MHz slots and one 32-bit/33 MHz slots). With 512 MB of main memory and 18 GB of disk capacity, the ML350 G3 costs $1,849 in a tower model and $2,099 in a rack-mounted configuration.

The third new ProLiant server that HP announced last week is the third-generation ML370 machine, which is a two-way rack-mounted machine that uses 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 Xeon processors. This 5U server is based on the Grand Champion-SC chipset, and it offers six 64-bit PCI-X slots running at 100 MHz and a 400 MHz frontside bus; main memory is expandable to 12 GB. The ML370 G3 has room for eight disk drives, or over 582 GB of total capacity using 72.8 GB disks. A base ML370 G3 with 512 MB of main memory and an 18 GB disk drive sells for $3,028 in a tower configuration and $3,328 in a rack-mounted configuration.