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Faulty drives delay IBM PC server shipments in US

By Linda Leung

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Defective hard drives in IBM?s PC servers have been blamed for the company falling back in quarterly shipment ratings.

According to research company IDC, which carries out a quarterly survey of PC server shipments, IBM's second place was snatched in the last quarter by Hewlett Packar, while Compaq remains top dog.

IBM US suffered delays in delivering its servers because it had bought faulty drives from an unnamed supplier. It has since sourced components elsewhere but shipments have been delayed until January or February. The drives would have put users at risk of data corruption problems.

Samuel Palmisano, general manager at the IBM PC Company, said: ?I made a decision which I think is in the long term interest of IBM and its customers, and in the short term we took a hit on it.?

UK and European customers will not be affected by this as PCs are manufactured in Greenock and components are sourced from local developers, said Paul Bentley, a member of IBM?s PC server marketing team.

New models may also help next quarter's figures. IBM unveiled two PC servers, heralding its transistion to Pentium Pro. The PC Server 325 is aimed at departments with up to 100 users and sits above the existing 310, which runs on the 166MHz Pentium. The 325 boasts 256Kbytes of dedicated cache and will be available in December for #3,906.

The PC Server 330 replaces IBM?s existing 520 line. As well as running on the 200MHz Pentium Pro, it provides two-way symmetric multiprocessing and can be used standalone or clustered. It will also be available in December priced at #4,954.

The latest machines follow last month?s launch of IBM's high end PC server, the Pentium Pro-based 704.

All the machines come with 90 days technical support for direct customers and indefinite telephone support for resellers.

According to the IDC figures, Compaq boasts a 31 per cent market share in this sector and shipped 96,000 PC servers worldwide last quarter. HP controls 12 per cent of the market with 39,000 units shipped, while IBM is on 10 per cent with 30,000 boxes sold.

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