Big Blue fills gap in Unix server line

The p610, a two-processor system code-named Colt, has a starting price of $7,495, said Val Rahmani, the new general manager of IBM's Unix server division. More typical models with two processors, 8GB of memory and two 36GB hard drives cost $43,800, the company said.

IBM's Unix server business is in the midst of a years-long recovery, after the company was caught flat-footed by the rise of Sun in the late 1990s.

Sun filled the void left when servers using Intel chips and Microsoft Windows failed to live up to promises, winning the top position in the Unix server market. In 2000, that market had $29 billion in sales, according to research firm IDC, making it the largest segment of the overall $60 billion server market.

The p610 can be freestanding or bolted to a rack. It measures 8.75 inches tall in its rack-mounted configuration and comes with either 375MHz or 450MHz Power 3-II CPUs. --Stephen Shankland, Special to ZDNet News