Compaq 222863-001 Compaq TaskSmart Appliance Servers: Computing Paradigm of th - Page 3

Compaq TaskSmart Appliance Servers: Computing Paradigm of the Future 3 Accelerating Business Advantage with Compaq TaskSmart Servers The Customer Challenge Internet content continues to grow explosively, attracting ever-widening audiences. Nielsen Media Research estimates the United States Internet population at 99 million, up 43% from a year ago. According to the United Nations, the Internet will have 200 million users "within a year or so." At the same time, companies are drawn to the web by the potential for e-commerce. In a recent Duke University study, 56% of companies surveyed claim they will be selling on the Internet by next year. Analyst predictions for the size of the e-commerce market in 2000 range from $66 billion (Forrester Research) to $153 billion (IDC). This translates into a surge of data and applications, and therefore complexity. Enterprise customers find themselves with proliferating server farms and many new applications awaiting deployment. Also, industry-standard computing has created an ever-widening range of solution choices. This range of choices, together with the continuing shortage of trained IT staff, means that customers are now experiencing serious bottlenecks in deploying their solutions. One approach to accelerating solution deployment is to deliver hardware, operating system, and application software as a complete product: configured, tuned, and optimized. Using long experience in application integration and partnering with leading software vendors, Compaq is the first leading vendor to support this new computing architecture: appliance servers. These products - to be delivered under the Compaq TaskSmart brand - are single-purpose systems, tuned and optimized for one specific application. They include all the hardware and software components necessary to deliver that specific computing function with extremely high performance and reliability. Appliance servers provide complete integration for key applications - essential building blocks for customers to deploy complete business solutions, augmenting the current industry-standard approach for specific applications. Uniquely, TaskSmart Appliance servers support two complimentary directions of Compaq's innovation strategy: • Driving high-volume, standards-based hardware innovation, such as Automatic Server Recovery, redundant power supplies, PCI Hot Plug, VI Architecture, and PCI-X. • Advancing smarter solutions, from the original SmartStart and Compaq Insight Manager through activeAnswers and Intelligent Cluster Administration. The TaskSmart appliance server family is another step forward, providing tools and techniques that empower customers, system integrators, and others with smarter solutions at less complexity and lower cost. The Customer Advantage of TaskSmart Servers Many customers see clear advantages in using TaskSmart servers. For Don Porter, manager of network and information at Salt Lake City-based Utah Link EdNet, using CompaqTaskSmart caching servers to speed Web access in schools was an easy choice. 0194-0699-A