Compaq serves up Pentium Pros

Compaq moves an increasingly critical departmental server line from the Pentium to the Pentium Pro processor and adds enterprise-level features.

Brooke Crothers Former CNET contributor

Brooke Crothers writes about mobile computer systems, including laptops, tablets, smartphones: how they define the computing experience and the hardware that makes them tick. He has served as an editor at large at CNET News and a contributing reporter to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. His interest in things small began when living in Tokyo in a very small apartment for a very long time.

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Brooke Crothers

Oct. 21, 1996 2:00 a.m. PT

2 min read

Compaq Computer (CPQ) is moving an increasingly critical departmental server line from the Pentium to the Pentium Pro processor while adding enterprise-level features and support for Unix-based management platforms such as Hewlett-Packard's OpenView.

Compaq is positioning the new line as the successor to the ProLiant 1500, a dual processor-capable Pentium server. The 2500 with a 200-MHz Pentium Pro processor, integrating 256KB of level-2 cache, will improve performance by more than 200 percent over the 1500, Compaq said.

The departmental ProLiant 2500 follows the introduction in June of the quad processor-capable ProLiant 5000 Pentium Pro enterprise server.

The new line will be dual 200-MHz Pentium Pro-capable and include such high-availability features as hot-pluggable hard drives, an offline emergency processor that brings the system back up in the case of processor failure, redundant network interface cards, and redundant power supplies.

The ProLiant 2500 will use an integrated Wide-Ultra SCSI controller that will support 9GB Ultra SCSI drives in the first quarter of 1997. Other features include an option for five hot-pluggable bays or four standard ones for up to 300GB of internal storage, an integrated 10/100TX Ethernet controller, and 32MB of ECC memory standard, expandable to 1GB.

The 2500 line supports both IntranetWare from Novell, which includes integrated NetWare SMP (Symmetric MultiProcessing), and Windows NT 4.0 from Microsoft, which is also a multiprocessing platform for Pentium Pro processors.

Compaq also offers software such as SmartStart and Insight Manager to make setting up and managing the server more efficient.

Moreover, Compaq is providing Insight Manager for OpenView and for TME 10 NetView based on Hewlett-Packard's OpenView and IBM's TME 10 NetView. This allows users to "monitor Compaq servers with the most popular Unix-based enterprise management platforms," the company said.

The 2500 with no hard drives installed and 32MB of memory is priced at $6,000. A system with no hard drives but has hot-pluggable support and 32MB of memory is priced at $6,700.

Compaq is also offering an upgrade module for 1500 users. A module with one 200-MHz Pentium Pro processor that is capable of holding another and 32MB of EDO memory is priced at $3,339.