Gateway servers aim high
The consumer PC vendor attempts to make inroads into the upper echelons of the business market.
Gateway's new servers will run Microsoft's Windows NT, Novell's Netware, SCO's UnixWare, and Sun's Solaris operating systems. The latter three are variants of Unix, more often the operating system of choice when several servers are linked together.
The Gateway models come in a "rack mountable" design, meaning the servers can be stored one on top of another or side by side. Rack-mountable designs are chiefly intended for large corporate "enterprise" customers, a market that Gateway has yet to penetrate in a meaningful way.
An ALR-7200R with a 350-MHz Pentium II chip, a 4GB hard drive, and 64MB of memory is priced at $3,649. The same system with a 400-MHz chip will sell for $4,049.
The ALR-8200R model with a 350-MHz Pentium II, a 4GB hard drive, and 128MB of memory lists for $5,499, while a 400-Mhz Pentium II system starts at $5,899.
Gateway will sell the servers directly and also market them through a new program with value-added resellers (VARs). Like fellow direct seller Dell, Gateway increasingly has paired with VARs in an effort to reach the high-end corporate customers that utilize multiserver environments.
The servers will be available in June.