Dell Offers Enterprise Availability in Departmental Server; Company to Ship New Dual-Processor 800 MHz Pentium III Xeon System

Business Wire, Jan 25, 2000

Business Editors &High-Tech Writers

ROUND ROCK, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 25, 2000

Dell Computer Corporation (Nasdaq:DELL), the world's leading direct computer systems company, today extended enterprise-class capabilities into departmental servers with the worldwide introduction of the Dell(R) PowerEdge(R) 4400 server.

As the No.2 PC server provider in the world(1) and a leading provider of servers for the Internet infrastructure, Dell continues to define price/performance and value in PC servers with the PowerEdge 4400. The PowerEdge 4400 offers power and expansion features generally found only in enterprise-class servers at a departmental server price with prices starting $4,699 for floor-standing models. Rack-mountable options are also available.

The PowerEdge 4400 departmental server takes performance and reliability to enterprise levels of availability and uptime by incorporating up to two 800MHz Pentium III Xeon(R) processors with 133MHz front side bus (FSB) support and a 64-bit quad-peer PCI architecture. The PowerEdge 4400 enhances its availability with hot-pluggable redundant fans and hot-pluggable, redundant peripheral component interconnect (PCI) support. It is well-suited to run email, database, Internet/intranet, e-commerce and file/print applications for departments or small-to-medium sized businesses.

&uot;The PowerEdge 4400 is designed to deliver the high performance enterprise-class availability and investment protection customers need at departmental server price,&uot; said Michael Lambert, senior vice president, Dell's Enterprise Systems Group. &uot;With the PowerEdge 4400, Dell is once again a leader in providing customers with the performance and value they want in a server.&uot;

Added Power and Protection for Important Applications

The PowerEdge 4400 supports up to 252 GB of internal storage, or a total of 288GB when two optional 18GB hot pluggable drives are installed in the removable media bay. The PowerEdge 4400 server offers customers a choice of redundant array of inexpensive disk (RAID) technology, including embedded Ultra3 (Ultra160) RAID on the motherboard, called PERC 3/Di. This technology gives customers a less-expensive alternative for the protection of important data. PERC 3/Di features dual-channel RAID capabilities with 64 or 128 MB of battery-backed cache and twice the performance bandwidth as Ultra2/LVD (160MB/s versus 80MB/s.) Alternatively, customers can install the PERC 2/DC, Dell's new dual-channel RAID card, when clustering the PowerEdge 4400 to achieve added levels of data availability. Dell PowerVault(R) 200S series external SCSI storage systems, including the newly announced PowerVault 210S and 211S systems, which will house up to 12 hard drives, provide optional additional storage capacity to PowerEdge 4400 customers.

Scalable to Meet Customers Growing Needs

Customers can choose between small computer system interconnect (SCSI) or Fibre Channel server-attached storage technologies when clustering two PowerEdge 4400 servers. Clustering allows customers to rely on the PowerEdge 4400 to run business-critical applications with less system downtime. For shared Fibre Channel storage in a cluster, customers can take advantage of the PowerVault 650 Fibre Channel Storage System, which accommodates growing storage needs with external storage capacities of 4TB (terabytes) in a single data center rack.

Manageability and Support

All Dell PowerEdge servers ship with a suite of Dell OpenManage(R) systems management tools that are designed to help customers gain better control of their systems, reduce their total cost of ownership, and easily manage PowerEdge systems within their preferred enterprise management framework. In the United States, Dell's OpenManage Resolution Assistant(R) software ships on all PowerEdge servers, including the PowerEdge 4400, and provides customers with Internet-enabled product support from Dell, helping network managers resolve technical issues more quickly and efficiently.

When clustering the PowerEdge 4400, customers can use Dell OpenManage ClusterX Assistant with Cluster X Technology(R) to more easily monitor, control and maintain clusters on their networks. The Dell PowerEdge 4400 also ships with Hewlett-Packard(R) OpenView Network Node Manager Special Edition(R) for management of up to 250 nodes and easily integrates into existing network management frameworks. Additional information on Dell OpenManage products is available at http://www.dell.com/us/en/biz/topics/openmanage_om_main_main.htm.> The Dell PowerEdge 4400 will support the latest versions of Microsoft(R) Windows NT(R), Novell(R) NetWare(R) and is slated to support Red Hat Linux 6.1 as of mid-February, 2000. The PowerEdge 4400 will support Windows 2000 Server and Advanced Server when announced by Microsoft on Feb. 17, 2000. These operating systems will be installed through Dell's standard factory process. Other operating systems can be configured, tested and factory-installed upon customer request through DellPlus(R) custom integration.