Compaq serves at under $2,000

Compaq (CPQ) has introduced Pentium processor-based servers priced below $2,000 targeted at the burgeoning small and medium-sized business market.

The Prosignia 200 is being positioned as a "small network" server and will now constitute the entry level for Compaq servers. To date, the Prosignia 300 "workgroup" server has occupied this spot. The 500 "departmental" server is the high end of the Prosignia lineup. Above this, at the enterprise level, Compaq offers the Proliant line of servers.

The small and medium business market is growing almost 50 percent faster than the total server market and already represents 32 percent of the overall market, according to Compaq.

Compaq says there are about 165,000 medium-sized businesses, 770,000 small businesses, and 6,300,000 very small businesses out there as potential customers. Medium-sized businesses have fewer than 1,000 employees, small businesses have fewer than 100, and very small businesses fewer than 20.

The 166-MHz Pentium servers will come with a preinstalled network interface card and some technologies found on higher-end servers such as Wide-Ultra SCSI storage drive technology and Compaq software, to ease setup and administration of the servers.

Both IntranetWare from Novell and Windows NT 4.0 from Microsoft are supported.

A system with a 166-MHz Pentium processor and a 1.6GB hard disk drive is priced at $1,983. A system without a hard disk drive is priced at $1,667.