Dell, Microsoft Both Show They Know What SMB Server-Users WantDell, Microsoft Both Show They Know What SMB Server-Users Want

Dell has announced a new line of servers tuned to the needs of the small-business market, while Microsoft has announced that its upcoming virtualization product will be a free download.Dell announced its new T100 server, with features aimed at first-time server users. Based on a nine-country survey the vendor sponsored, Dell decided that small businesses are worried about backups and security. So the T100 includes RAID architecture for transparent backups, a chassis intrusion switch, a Trusted Platform Module chip, and, inside the secured chassis, a locked-down USB port.

It also sports a quad-core Xeon processor, and up to 8 gigabytes of RAM, and two terabytes of disk space. The base price is $449.

Dell touts its new mini-tower unit as being quiet, but does not offer an industry-standard L-WAd or L-pAm acoustical noise rating. Mini-towers, however, typically don't rise much about the background noise level.

Microsoft, meanwhile, announced that its Hyper V Server 2008 hypervisor will be a free download when it comes out October 8. A management tool, Virtual Machine Manager 2008, will not be free.

According to press coverage, Microsoft has also stopped charging license fees to server customers who move their server software from one machine to another. Forty-one different server applications were covered, including some editions of SQL Server 2008, Exchange Server 2007, Dynamics CRM 4.0, SharePoint Server 2007, and System Center products.

Microsoft has also teamed with AMD to make Opteron CPU chips more amenable to virtualization.

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