Gateway Rolls Out Xeon Servers, Readies Opterons

Published: October 10, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

While Gateway is best known as a vendor of personal computers--and one of the innovators in direct marketing of PCs--the company has tried a number of times to get a toe-hold in the server business. The reason is simple: servers and the software and services that are usually sold in conjunction with them have a lot bigger inherent profit margins than do PCs. Of course, if there is a business that is almost as cut-throat as the PC business, it is the X64 server market.

These days, on the server front, Gateway has tower and rack-mounted servers, and it also sells network-attached storage (NAS) disk arrays as well as storage area network (SAN) arrays and various network switches to link gear together. While Gateway does not have as broad a product line as Hewlett-Packard, Dell, IBM, Sun Microsystems, or Fujistu-Siemens, the company's products cover the sweet spots in the market and are available at competitive prices--particularly if you bring Gateway into a competitive situation.

To get a slice of the server pie, Gateway has revamped its server line with new dual-core "Woodcrest" Xeon 5100 processors, which plug into two-socket servers. The company also revealed that it is working on Opteron-based servers, too, which all of the major vendors are offering these days as well as designs based on Intel Xeon chips.

To compete, any server vendor needs three products based on the Woodcrest chips and its predecessors: a tower machine, a 1U skinny rack-mounted server, and a 2U rack server that has a bit more room for expansion. All are based on motherboards that use Intel's "Blackford" 5000P chipset. All of the machines support the same three processor options, giving customers the same range of raw processor performance. The new Gateway boxes support the 1.6 GHz Xeon 5110 (which has a 1 GHz front side bus), the 2 GHz Xeon 5130 (with a 1.3 GHz bus), and the 3 GHz Xeon 5160 (also with a 1.3 GHz bus). All of the machines support 667 MHz Fully Buffered DIMM main memory, and can have up to 32 GB of capacity in 8 slots. They all have Matrox G200 video cards on the motherboard as well, and dual Gigabit Ethernet ports.

Marc Tanguay, senior group manager for servers at Gateway, says that the boards were designed by the company and are manufactured on an OEM basis by Taiwanese electronics maker Inventec. The motherboards in all three servers can be equipped with a special adapter card called Gateway Lights Out, or GLO, that allows remote keyboard, video, and mouse (KVM) and remote media over the Internet. This means administrators can access the servers from anywhere in the world using devices that are physically located with them. All of the servers have integrated disk controllers for supporting RAID 5 plus hot spare or RAID 10 disk arrays, too. All three machines come with a three-year, onsite, next-day support contract, including parts and labor. Tanguay is keen on the new design of the Gateway machines, which allow them to be opened up and configured without so much as a screwdriver. (This is the way all servers are heading.)

The first new Gateway server is the E-9520-T, and as the name suggests, it is a 5U tower server that is aimed at small businesses where this will be the primary machine. This machine has six expansion slots: three PCI-Express, two PCI-X, and 1 PCI. It has room for ten hot-swap Serial-Attached SCSI (SAS) or SATA-II disk drives. Gateway is putting 15K RPM SAS disks with 36 GB, 73 GB, and 146 GB capacities into the E-9520-T, and SATA-II disks in 80 GB, 250 GB, 500 GB, and 750 GB capacities where storage capacity is more important to customers than performance. That gives customers as much as 1.5 TB of total disk capacity using SAS drives and as much as 7.5 TB using SATA-II drives, which is a lot for a small business. The server comes with a 700 watt power supply, and can be equipped with a redundant spare supply. A base E-9520-T costs $2,199 with no operating system installed.

The E-9425R is the 1U rack-mounted machine. To fit in such cramped quarters, this motherboard only has expansion slots on two riser cards. Customers can choose from a riser with one low-profile PCI-Express slot, or a full-height riser that supports a PCI-Express or PCI-X slot. This rack-mounted machine has room for four hot swap disks, either SAS or SATA-II (in the same capacities that are supported in the tower server), and it comes with a 650 watt power supply. If customers want redundancy, they can add a redundant power supply. A base machine costs $1,849 with no operating system installed.

Finally, the E-9525R is the new 2U rack-mounted Woodcrest server from Gateway. This machine has five slots in total on two riser cards, including a mix of PCI-Express and PCI-X slots. The E-9525R supports five disk drives (again, with the same SAS and SATA-II options). This machine has a 700 watt power supply, which can be doubled up. A base box with no operating system costs $1,899.

The two rack servers use exactly the same motherboard, and they differ from each other only in the rise cards that plug into the boards to offer peripheral expansion. Because of this, customers who want to use a mix of 1U and 2U machines can qualify one and they know all of their software will work the same on both machines. The software stack and the driver sets are the same--and this is a real advantage in the server market. The electronics in 1U and 2U servers are often substantially different within a single vendor's product line.

The interesting question, of course, is when Gateway is going to deliver Opteron variants of its servers. And, according to Tanguay, Gateway customers will not have to wait long for this. "We plan to work with Advanced Micro Devices on Opteron designs," Tanguay confirmed, not even trying to duck the question. He said that customers should expect Gateway to put Opteron in servers aimed at the volume segments--which means tower and 1U and 2U rack designs--and they should expect them later this year. The rumor mill says announcements could come some time in October, in fact.

Gateway sells its servers either preloaded with Microsoft's Windows Server 2003, including Standard Edition, Enterprise Edition, and SBS 2003 Standard and Premium Editions. The company will also sell a bare-bones machine if you want to install an earlier Windows release, any one of a number of Linuxes, or even SCO Unix or Novell NetWare on the box.

Gateway is also trying to use nationalism to boost its server sales in the enterprise. These servers are being manufactured solely in its build-to-order factory in Nashville, Tennessee, which just opened. The company is also providing technical support that is not coming from offshored facilities, but from sites that are located only in North America. (Unlike Dell and just about every bank and telecom company I have dealt with in the past few years.) If the tech support is good, this could actually end up being a key differentiator.

Tanguay is also trying to get companies to buy more than iron from Gateway, and is peddling services for network planning and implementation, backup and disaster recovery, data and application migration, server virtualization, server consolidation, storage area networking implementation, and Citrix connectivity middleware implementation.

What Gateway needs to do is start preconfiguring Red Hat and Novell Linux on its machines. Three years ago, before Novell bought SUSE, Gateway tapped SUSE Linux to be its official Linux. But somewhere along the way, Gateway stopped talking about Linux, even though its machines clearly support it.

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