Cubix launches dual Xeon-based blade; Proxim cuts prices
Cubix has launched a dual Xeon-based blade server with support for RAID 5, Windows 2003, SQL Server and Linux systems. The company's blade, the BladeStation XP4, which uses 2.8-GHz Xeon processors, supports as many as four 147G-byte hot-pluggable drives. It also supports as much as 8G bytes of RAM and has four PCI-X/PCI slots, dual 10/100M bit/sec Ethernet connections, a 10/100/1,000M bit/sec Ethernet adapter and an integrated keyboard-video-mouse switch. The BladeStation enclosure is 6U high and could contains three blades and redundant, hot-swappable power supplies. The BladeStation XP4 starts at $2,600 and is expected to ship in February.
Wireless LAN vendor Proxim last week cut prices by almost one-third for its Orinoco wireless LAN access points and introduced an access point using the 54M bit/sec IEEE 802.11g standard. The company lowered the price of its main enterprise access point, the Orinoco AP-2000, from $900 to $600. The AP-2000 is a two-slot access point that can hold 11M bit/sec 802.11b adapters and, by attaching a separate kit, 54M bit/sec 802.11a adapters. The AP-2500, designed as combination access point and gateway to be deployed quickly for public wireless hot spots, is now $800, down from $1,100. The new Proxim 11g Kit, which will ship in the second quarter of 2003, is based on the draft IEEE standard known as 802.11g. This standard takes the same radio frequency as 802.11b, the 2.4-GHz band, but uses a different modulation scheme to boost the data rate to 54M bit/sec. The new product will let network managers boost 2.4-GHz throughput for a user if the user devices also are equipped with corresponding 802.11g adapters. The kit, which attaches to the AP-2000, is the first of several 802.11g products, according to Proxim. Suggested retail price is $150.