ANTenna Blog -- How-To

Just in time for Christmas, a small vendor in Colorado brings out a Core i7 server.

Just when you'd think that the industry had gone home for the Holidays, someone fires the next shot in the server wars. For whatever reason, Visionman Computers chose Christmas Week to release its Acserva ViXone7 family of servers, touted as the first servers on the market to use Intel's highly anticipated Nehalem architecture.

Nehalem, of course, is the code name for Intel's answer to AMD's "Shanghai" technology for the Opteron processor. Shanghai came out last month. Both technologies are supposed to increase throughput by about a third while reducing power consumption.

But keep in mind that the Visionman uses the Intel Core i7. Brought out by Intel last month, the Core i7 is actually intended for the desktop market. Xeon versions of Nehalem, intended for the server market, are expected next year.

The units come in minitower and rack-mount configurations, and start at about $1,800. Remote management functions are optionally available, plus SAS storage, and the firm will build units to customer specifications.

Visionman is a part of Silicon Mountain Holdings, a $27.4 million company in Boulder, CO. Visionman sells directly and through various retail channel such as CompUSA, PC Mall, and TigerDirect.

Competition is good, as participation in the server market by smaller firms like Visionman conjures visions (no pun intended, of course) of the Old Days in the PC market, when scads of firms were making clones. But PCs eventually became commodities that were sold mostly on price, and the smaller participants were squeezed out. As for the same germ infecting the server market, that's probably not going to happen any time soon—there are still too many ways to achieve product differentiation for servers to turn into commodities.

So, with that thought, Merry Christmas to all.

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