Hardware Today: Gateway Server Snapshot
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Gateway's revamped server offerings have given the company renewed market impetus, particularly in the government and education sectors. In the past few months, the company overhauled its rack and tower products, adding better and larger SCSI drives, more RAID options, lower-priced SATA drives, redundant power and fans, more powerful chips, and an improved 4-way server. Gateway may be leaving the large-scale enterprise market to the Big Four and concentrating on the lower end, but its latest offerings are state-of-the-art enough to warrant a closer look.
"We are not targeting the telco or Fortune 500, as HP, Dell, and IBM do business there, and it gets very competitive," says Tim Diefenthaler, Gateway's senior director server product marketing. "We aim more at the public sector, as well as midenterprise accounts."
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While the company does a good bit of government business (on the federal, state, and local levels), it is especially strong in the education field. Diefenthaler cites this as a strategic sector for Gateway, and one on which the company places particular emphasis, as evidenced by the large complement of sales staff assigned to the education sector.
"We have excellent price-performance products that meet the needs of the education market," he says.
Gateway on the Rack
Since the last Gateway Server Snapshot appeared in ServerWatch, the company has considerably upgraded its products, as the table below illustrates. The recently released Gateway 9415 contains the latest technology. It has a 1U chassis with three hot-swappable SCSI hard drives (up to 300 GB per drive for a maximum of 900 GB per server) and redundant power supplies.
| Server | Description | Processor Range | No. of Processors | Base Price |
| 9510 | Workgroup and enterprise tower server with flexibility and performance, hot swap redundant cooling and optional redundant power | Dual Xeon Processor, 2.8GHz to 3.6GHz (1MB and 2MB Cache) | 1 to 2 | $999 |
| 9315 | General-purpose, 1U rack server with solid performance and RAID 5 protection | Dual Xeon Processor, 2.8GHz to 3.6GHz (1 MB and 2 MB Cache) | 1 to 2 | $999 |
| 9415 | High-performance 1U rack server with high availability features, including hot-swap redundant power supplies and RAID-5 reliability | Dual Xeon Processor, 2.8GHz to 3.6GHz (1 MB and 2 MB Cache) | 1 to 2 | $1,199 |
| 9515 | Scalable 2U rack server with high availability and performance, hot swap redundant cooling and optional redundant power | Dual Xeon Processor, 2.8GHz to 3.6GHz (1 MB and 2 MB Cache) | 1 to 2 | $1,249 |
| 9715 | 4-way rack (or available tower configuration) server providing maximum uptime for mission-critical applications and environments | MP Xeon Processor, 3.0GHz to 3.66GHz (1 MB or 8 MB Cache) | 1, 2 or 4 | $3,999 |
"Redundant power in small form factors is being required by most of our customers due to the amount of data you can put in the box," says Diefenthaler.
According to Diefenthaler, this is the first 1U chassis available with redundant power that can run RAID 5. Dell and HP 1U units, for example, have only two SCSI drives that can run only RAID 0 and 1. The 9415 is aimed at large data centers running applications like ERP, CRM, Web servers, and database, as it offers the processing power and redundancy in a 1U box typically found only in the 2U form factor. Pricing begins at $1,199.
Gateway showcased two other new rack servers earlier this year. The Gateway 9515 has a 2U enclosure, six hard drives (each up to 600 GB), up to six PCI slots, and redundant power. The Gateway 9315 is styled as a value-based 1U rack. It has a dual processor, but no redundant power and dispensed with SCSI. Instead, it uses three lower-cost (and somewhat lower-performance) Serial ATA (SATA) drives. Each drive is up to 400 GB drives and can be placed in a RAID 5 configuration.
"The Gateway 9315 is really for the public sector and certain business applications like backup server," says Diefenthaler. "It gives decent performance, a lot of capacity in a small space, and doesn't cost a lot."
