Dell lops server prices by 28%
Hoping to maintain momentum in the PC server market, Dell on its entire line of server computers.
The reductions follow an International Data Corporation report earlier this month that the worldwide PC server market grew by 37 percent and exceeded $10.5 billion in revenue in 1997. Dell, the fourth-largest vendor with a 6 percent market share, experienced phenomenal revenue growth, logging a 181 percent revenue gain.
PC server growth has been spurred by increased shipments to the small business market, as well as continuing purchases by information system departments at corporations, markets which Dell has previously targeted with great success. PC servers are usually defined as Intel processor-based systems which cost less than $25,000.
Dell cut the price on its PowerEdge 2200 servers by up to 17.2 percent; a system with a 300-MHz Intel Pentium II processor, 128MB of memory, and a 9GB hard disk drive is priced at $7,724, down from $9,324, for instance.
The lowest-price server comes with a 233-MHz Pentium II processor, 32MB of memory, a 4GB hard disk drive for $2,427, a reduction of four percent from $2,527.
For applications in workgroup, or midrange, environments, Dell says the PowerEdge 4200 received price cuts of up to nine percent. A system with two 300-MHz Pentium II processors, 512MB of memory, and 27GB of storage was priced at $13,419 and is now priced at $12,219.
The price cuts on the 2200 and 4400 systems come just one day after the company announced the availability of Intel's 333-MHz Pentium II in some server models that will be priced starting at $2,859 (See related story).
Finally, Dell says it is cutting prices on the 6100 series servers up to 28.9 percent. This enterprise, or corporate, family of systems incorporates the Pentium Pro processor with 1MB of secondary "cache" memory, used to speed up computing. A PowerEdge 6100 with four 200-MHz Pentium Pro processors, 4GB of memory, and 27GB of storage falls to $42,500 from $59,767.