Most IT departments want to get their hands on the latest dual-core technology to see how it performs in the real world. Penn State University's high-performance computing (HPC) department, for example, wants to add dual-core Sun boxes. It is particularly interested in the SunFire V40Z server, a machine that can hold up to eight AMD Opteron chips. The starting price is $13,995.

"The next batch of servers we order will be dual core," says Vijay Agarwala, director of HPC at Penn State. "I think dual core is a significant technological advance."

For a less-expensive entrance into the dual-core universe, HP offers an alternative for $4,299. The HP ProLiant DL 380 comes with Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) Intel Xeon-based 2.8 GHz dual core processors (2x2).

"Dual core servers with SAS technology help customers consolidate business-critical application environments to reduce complexity and cost while increasing business agility," says Colin Lacey, director of platform marketing, Industry Standard Servers, HP. "With SAS being the logical evolution in networking and storage, bottlenecks are eliminated and the communication speed between drives and host servers is substantially increased."

With the events of the recent hurricane season fresh in their minds, many IT professionals are taking a closer look at disaster recovery and fault tolerance (FT). NEC offers the Express5800/Fault Tolerant Server with two redundant sets of four Intel Xeon MP 2.8 GHz CPUs. It is designed with complete hardware redundancy — every component has an identical twin, so there is no single point of failure. If a component does fail, it provides instantaneous failover to the redundant component. Pricing begins at $21,000.

"Available for both Windows and Linux, the Express5800 FT server delivers higher performance and added protection against downtime at the application level," says Brad Lightner, director of product and solutions at NEC Solutions (America). "It offers up to 99.999 percent continuous availability."

If that's too spendy to progress from wish list to purchase order, less-expensive, yet worthwhile solutions are available. Some data protection products, for example, have come way down in price. Unitrends Data Protection Unit (DPU) provides rapid recovery for multiple servers. It is an integrated hardware and software appliance that uses disk-to-disk data protection at an entry price of about $8,000. In addition to data and applications, it can restore a full operating system along with passwords and permissions. System snapshots can be taken as often as desired.

"The Bare Metal Plus software in our DPU's provides file-level backup and recovery," says Mark Phillippi, director of product management at Unitrends. "If a server crashes, it can be fully restored in about 30 minutes. Businesses can recover from a site failure in a couple of hours."

Another recovery technology getting a lot of media mileage is Continuous Data Protection (CDP). Top-of-the-line systems can run to the hundreds of thousands of dollars. But a little start up called Lasso Logic has priced its business-quality Lasso CDP units starting at less than $1,000. The system takes an initial full copy of all files, then records changes as they occur. The user right clicks on any file or previous version of the file to recover it.

"The procedure takes a few seconds — a lot faster than having to find the right tape, call a busy IT person, and then find your file," says Anna Yen, general manager of Lasso Logic.