Intel Unleashes New Xeon Wares

The five new motherboards are aimed at dual-processor servers, said Phil Brace, director of marketing for Intel's Enterprise Platform and Services Division.

Dan Nester, president of Build To Order Manufacturing, an Atlanta-based builder of white-box servers and PCs, said Xeon-based servers account for about 40 percent of his company's server builds on a revenue basis.

Nester said Intel has a very good product road map, and its processors' Hyper-Threading technology is a big boost to performance on high-end servers.

However, Intel has one habit that throws systems builders for a loop: Product revisions come too quickly, Nester said. "They seem to come every quarter or so," he said. "This creates more SKUs and more options for us. As we go through the 533MHz transition, there'll still be older products in use. So we need to carry more inventory."

Intel's new motherboards include a single-processor model designed for 1U or 2U chassis and include on-board dual Gbit and dual Ultra320 SCSI or ATA RAID controllers, Brace said. The company also will introduce three dual-processor motherboards: a performance board with dual Gbit and dual Ultra320 SCSI controllers; a volume server board with dual Gbit and a single Ultra 320 SCSI controller; and a value board for the SMB space with dual Gbit and one ATA

connector.

In addition, the company will release two new chassis that are similar to current models but include support for the new Serial ATA hard-drive specifications and come with a new power supply to cut costs, Brace said.

Intel this week also plans to introduce a new dual Ultra 320 SCSI controller, a new four-port controller supporting Serial ATA hard drives, and a module that turns on-board SCSI controllers into a full-featured RAID subsystem.