IBM Tuesday unveiled two new Unix servers priced at less than $4,000, a move aimed at taking market share from Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems in the low-end Unix space.
The new servers are the first one-way and two-way Unix servers based on IBM's Power5 processors, the next-generation chip technology the vendor rolled out in July, said Jeff Howard, program director for IBM's pSeries offering.
IBM, Armonk, N.Y., has not offered one- and two-way Unix servers in several years, but the company has identified an opportunity to grab market share from HP and Sun in the high-volume, low-end Unix market, Howard said. This is why the new two-way Power5 servers are so competitively priced, he said.
"There is a lot of room left to take share on the low end," Howard said. IBM already offers four-way Unix servers based on the Power5 chips, he added.
The new eServer p5 510 server is rack-mountable and has a 1.65GHz Power5 processor, Howard said. The server runs either the Linux or AIX operating systems, and pricing starts at $3,967.