Acer unveils new Xeon-based servers for SMBs

MANILA, Philippines - Acer, the company that brought us Ferrari computer notebooks and, soon, Android-based Ferrari smartphones, aims to drive up sales of its server products by launching a family of servers based on the latest Intel Xeon processors.

Acer now has new models of tower, blade and Gemini servers that, company officials say, offer good price value; room for growth in terms of data storage; space saving design; data center performance; and software tools for automated, remote and intelligent operation.

Four Acer tower servers — AT110, AT310, AT150 and AT350 — offer big data storage expansion that is rare in server classes in the market today. They range from four DDR2 800 ECC DIMMS and are capable of holding up to four 3.5-inch SATA hard drives to 18 DIMMs that can support eight 3.5-inch or 16 2.5-inch hard disk drives.

Acer’s new AB7000 blade server, on the other hand, can accommodate up to 12 DDR3 DIMMS and up to six hard drives per dual-socket node.

Gemini servers, in a class of their own, come in two models — AW1000 for the dual-node, and AW2000h for the quad-node.

Both run on two Intel Xeon 5500 or 5600 dual-core or quad-core processors for each node, and both models also feature 12 DDR3 DIMMs.

The AW1000 can hold up to eight 2.5-inch SATA hot-pluggable hard drives, while the AW2000h can pack up to 12 3.5-inch SATA hot-pluggable hard drives.

Finally, there are new Acer rack servers — AR160, AR320, AR360 and AR380 that likewise use anywhere from a dozen to 18 DDR3 DIMM slots complemented by several hot-pluggable hard drives, too.

Acer officials say these new servers can work well with legacy systems and come free with a suite of smart software tools. Companies can choose from any of these new 11 Acer server products and also run their server operating system of choice.