IBM Delivers On Its Promise

As promised by Big Blue’s push earlier this month when it made a huge splash into the web server business, IBM Monday announced a new line of eServer appliances, including Intel-based Linux and Windows web-hosting appliance servers.

“With the appliance server market growing at more than 50 percent a quarter, IBM has positioned these new eServer appliance offerings to address the explosive demand for businesses to build out their Internet infrastructure,” said Mark Melenovsky, research manager at International Data Corp. IDC projects the appliance server market is increase to an estimated $11 billion by 2004.

The xSeries eServers are based on IBM’s X-Architecture, a blueprint incorporating the latest mainframe technologies into industry standard Intel-based servers. The iSeries, meanwhile, features integrated open system functions built into the operating system.

The new eServer models include:

• The xSeries(b) 130 (Windows) and the xSeries 135 (Linux) – two speedy web-hosting appliance servers, offering the highest performance in the industry;
• The xSeries 150 – IBM’s first storage appliance, offering high performance and unmatched scalability – up to 1.7 TB, and throughput of 44MB per second;
• The iSeries(b) 400 model 270 – a Lotus. Domino server appliance offering peak performance at an economical price;
• and the iSeries 400 model 820 – the industry’s first Lotus Domino server appliance to deliver Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) technology.
  

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While other vendors, such as Cobalt,

have built an effective brand image in the web-hosting market, IBM is aggressively filling out its appliance server offering with an entire line of internally designed servers,

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Melenovsky said.