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Alienware gets into rackmounts

Alienware is looking to shed a bit of its "X-treme" gamer persona in favor of …

Here's something I wasn't expecting to land in my inbox: Alienware announced today that they are venturing into the rackmount server business, offering up single and dual-processor rack servers in three configurations. At launch, the Hivemind Rack Server line includes a budget model centered around the Pentium 4/Celeron D, and two models built around the Xeon. At this point in time, AMD isn't a part of their lineup, although AMD features prominently in other product offerings.

Here in the HQ the conversation has been mostly about just why Alienware, a company known for making highly customized, high-end gaming boxes, would venture into a market that's quite straight-laced. Alienware's PR anticipates that question, and answers it so:


That's PR-speak for "we think we can make some scratch." Alienware has made a similar move into business laptops, but so far it's been low key. Perhaps some quiet success there is driving this move, or perhaps it's hoped that moving into the lower end of the server space will enhance their business face all around. It could be both, or it could be a decision made by little grey aliens. You can never be truly sure.

So, does the hardware pass the pricing test? For giggles, we've priced a Hivemind 1525 against the Dell PowerEdge 1850. To bring the test to a battle of modest profit margins, we've sought the following specs: dual 3.6GHz Xeons with 2MB L2 Cache, no OS, and 2GB RAM (2x1GB). Both units are 1U.  The storage was dicey, because they offer different things. We loaded the Hivemind with embedded SATA RAID and two 120GB drives, while the Dell had embedded SCSI RAID, and two 146GB SCSI drives. The comparo: $4,439 for the Hivemind, and $4094 for the Dell. Dell, with that SCSI, looks to be the better value for a RAID 1 system, but your mileage may very depending on what you price, and what your actual I/O needs are.

Of course, price isn't everything. Alienware's biggest challenge is going to be getting the word out. So-called IT decision makers, at least the ones I've consulted with over the years, aren't exactly aware of Alienware. Then again, plenty of them seem to find out about companies such as Vision sooner or later, although I think that's primarily because of the number of Vision resellers out there.

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Channel Ars Technica