Gateway picks Woodcrest chips for servers

Gateway will use Intel's Woodcrest chip to power three new midrange servers, including the E-9520T high-performance tower server and the E-9425R and E-9525R rack-mounted servers, all of which were due to be shown Thursday at the Intel Developer Forum trade show.

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Gateway will emphasize the systems' flexibility as a way to compete with similar Woodcrest-powered servers from Hewlett-Packard and IBM. Users can customize the Gateway servers for applications ranging from Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases to Exchange e-mail, Web servers and back-office functions for small and medium-size businesses.

Gateway provides that flexibility by allowing each of the servers to run either one of two Woodcrest chips, based on a new, 65-nanometer architecture launched by Intel in June to compete with Opteron chips from Advanced Micro Devices. Users can pick from Intel's 1.6GHz Xeon 5110, 2.0GHZ Xeon 5130, or 3.0GHz Xeon 5160. Gateway had also partnered with Intel in August, using the related Conroe Core 2 Duo chip in a line of desktop PCs.

Users can also host their hard-drive storage using both high-performance SAS (serial attached SCSI) and cost-efficient SATA II (serial ATA) hard drives in the same system.

And IT administrators can remotely boot and troubleshoot the machines using the Web-based Gateway Lights Out system management function. Gateway plans to enhance that capability by the fourth quarter of 2006 with an optional LCD (liquid crystal diode) panel displaying the server's operating status, called the System Management Integrated LCD.

Gateway is charging $2,199 for the E-9520T tower with room for 7.5TB of storage, $1,899 for the E-9525R 2U server with room for 4.5TB of storage, and $1,849 for the E-9425R 1U server with room for 3.0TB of storage. All three machines come with one Intel Xeon 5110 chip, the Intel Blackford 5000P chip set, Matrox G200 graphics card, and 35GB of memory.