HP to unveil low-end server

HP will announce a low-end family of Intel Xeon processor-based servers later this year for enterprise branch offices.

Called the ProLiant 100, the servers will use one or two Intel Xeon processors, will have limited disk drive capacity, and will focus on easy deployment and configuration. They will ship with a stripped-down version of HP’s Insight Manager, to allow remote configuration, and ML150 System Monitor (MSM) software, to provide remote administration and monitoring of server components.

The ProLiant 100 family is expected to come in several desk-side tower configurations. It will ship configured with Microsoft’s Small Business Server.

HP is testing the waters for this family with the ProLiant ML150, which the company says was introduced in Asia in September.

The ML150 is available in four configurations. One configuration has one or two 2.4-GHz Xeon processors with up to 12G bytes of memory, a 10/100/1000M bit/sec Ethernet adapter and as much as 730G bytes of storage. Other models run at 2.8 GHz.

HP would not disclose U.S. pricing, but the ProLiant 100 family is expected to be priced similarly to Dell’s PowerEdge SC family and be configured so it can be easily installed in remote branch offices that do not have dedicated IT resources.