Acer hoping for dual-core business appeal

Consumer-oriented Acer is trying to boost its business server sales with the help of the Opteron processor

Acer has stormed up the notebook charts over the past two years to become the leading European supplier to the consumer market.

The company is now hoping to increase its foothold in the business-server sector with the launch of the Acer Altos G5350 for SMEs. This is the first dual-core AMD Opteron-based tower server from an OEM in Europe.

It is also an important win for AMD, which is slowly growing the number of tier-one suppliers offering corporate systems based on its Opteron technology.

Shipping this month, the Altos G5350 comes with either single- or dual-core Opterons on board, up to 16GB of memory and six PCI slots.

The server is being pitched as suitable for SMEs, departmental and enterprise applications, file, printer, email, web and FTP use. Acer will support NetWare 6.5, Windows Server x64 Enterprise Edition, Red Hat EAS 4.0 and SuSE ES 9.0.

John Roberts, server business unit manager at Acer EMEA, said: “The Acer Altos G5350 is designed to boost our customers’ productivity. It is an ideal solution for SMEs with no extensive IT infrastructure that are looking for performance and scalability.”

Pat Patla, director of server and workstation marketing at AMD, said: “AMD and Acer have worked closely together to provide a powerful platform addressing the specific requirements of the SME segment.

The dual-core AMD Opteron processor provides the computing capacity to support growing numbers of applications that are typically required by this market segment. Moreover, AMD64 technology protects companies’ software investments by enabling migration from 32 to 64bit computing as business needs evolve.”

Dual-core processor-based servers are new to the server space and are designed to greatly boost computer performance without increasing power or physical space requirements.