News Briefs - Hardware:

Dell Unveils PowerEdge 7250 Itanium Server

Dell has unveiled its PowerEdge 7250 server, a 64-bit system based on Intel's Itanium architecture. Dell's most powerful server system thus far, it will run applications in data centers and for customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP).

Boasting an open standards initiative, Dell said the machine offers something different than systems from other vendors like IBM, Sun Microsystems and HP.

The system's high floating-point performance and memory scalability will help to raise its popularity in high-performance computing cluster environments, including financial modeling, life sciences and digital animation.

Dell hopes to utilize its Itanium servers to garner a larger presence in the financial community.

The PowerEdge price, beginning at $12,499, offers a less expensive alternative for smaller companies.

PowerEdge 7250 features include up to four Itanium 2 processors with 6 megabytes of integrated cache within a 4U rack server; up to 32 gigabytes of memory; 8 PCI-X slots; Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 AS; and the Dell OpenManage systems management suite with IPMI support.

Competing with AMD's Opteron and IBM's POWER architectures, the PowerEdge 7250 is the latest major server to run Itanium.

Though applications for the architecture have been slow as of late, support from large companies like HP and Dell will help to propel Itanium's popularity for use as a solid platform.