Two systems vendors this week unveiled servers for small and midsized businesses - SGI announced a midrange Linux server, and Dell announced a dual-core server.

SGI’s $7,000 Altix 330 server is designed for manufacturing, database and bioinformatics workgroups within larger enterprises. It uses Intel’s Itanium 2 processor and can scale to as many as 16 processors and 128G bytes of memory.

It is a 1U high pizza-size box that contains one or two processors. Additional processors can be added by stacking Altix 330 servers and interconnecting them with SGI’s NUMAlink architecture.

NUMAlink, a 6.4G byte/sec bi-directional technology, interconnects servers much like Myricom’s Myrinet; it uses the shared memory architecture called NUMAflex.

The rack-mountable server runs either 64-bit versions of Red Hat or SuSE Linux. As many as 39 servers can fit in a 39U rack. The server runs at 1.3 GHz to 1.6 GHz.

The SGI Altix 330 will be available this month.

Dell’s PowerEdge SC430 uses Intel’s dual-core processor technology, where two processors share a single die, thus increasing performance and power efficiency. It replaces the PowerEdge SC420, doubling the older model’s speed and storage capacity.

Dell says the server is designed for e-mail, file and print sharing and Internet access - or for businesses looking to buy their first general-purpose server.

The server ships with the Dell Server Assistant for PowerEdge SC, a management utility used to install the operating system. It works with Microsoft Server 2003, or Red Hat or SuSE Linux.

The SC430 uses either Intel Celeron, Prescott or Pentium D processors and ships with as much as 4G bytes of RAM. It can be configured with Serial ATA or SCSI drives.

The SC430 is available now, starting at $499.