Acer aims to 'take over' with new AMD servers

Acer today unleashed a new range of servers onto the market, using AMD's latest processors.

With new rack, tower, multi-node and blade servers using the AMD Opteron 6000 series, Acer is hoping to take on the likes of Dell and HP.

At a press conference held today in Milan, Gianluca Degliesposti, vice president of global server business development at Acer, said: "[Acer] is like a car coming on the highway behind the likes of HP, IBM and Dell. We need to understand them, follow them and understand what they are doing but we also need to take over."

The first of the bundle of releases are two blade servers called the Gateway GB2x285 and the Gateway GB685. Both are aimed at high performance computing and enterprises, with the GB2x285 offering two dual socket nodes in one blade and the GB685 providing four separate CPUs in just one node.

The rack servers come with the model names GR385 and GR585. The first of the two offers up to 24 memory DIMMS, two 12 core CPUs and room for 16 HDDs. The second takes the title of the highest performer in the rack range with space for four CPUs in two rack units, which Acer claims will make it more cost effective to buy a four socket system that two dual sockets for the first time.

The final product to feature the latest AMD Opteron is Acer's multi-node server, which the firm claims has the best performance per watt with four hot-pluggable nodes in a 2U form.

Acer also announced it would be launching a Gateway tower server aimed at small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) later this year when AMD's Opteron 4000 processor becomes available. The GT115 F1 claims to offer reliability and scalability whilst not being so performance driven.