Toshiba Corp will this month start shipping a personal computer server to the US market and claims the new Magnia machine provides as higher levels of reliability as more expensive servers available from its competition. Toshiba’s US subsidiary, Toshiba America Information Systems Inc will make two Magnia models available, the Magnia 3000 workgroup server and the Magnia 5000 departmental server, both running on Pentium II processors at 350MHz or 400MHz. The introduction of the new PC servers comes following the announcement of Toshiba’s disappointing year end results (CI No 3,422), which it attributed largely to a decline in PC and semiconductor sales. But Toshiba thinks it has got it right with Magnia, and says the trend in enterprise computing away from the mainframe and towards client server systems will push the demand for PC servers in coming years. The Magnia 3000 and 5000 run up to two Pentium II’s at 350 or 400MHz and have a secondary 512Kb cache to enable high speed operation. The main memory in the 3000 can be expanded up to 1Gb, and up to four 9Gb hard disk drives can be combined in a 36Gb array. The Magnia 5000 has up to 12 of the 9Gb drives which can be combined to create a 108Gb array. An optional second Local Area Network card will provide users of both servers with fail safe redundancy and both be accessed and terminated remotely, according to Toshiba.
