Ashlee Vance

Hewlett-Packard Co. on Tuesday cut prices by up to 31 per cent in North America on some of its low-end Intel Corp.-based servers and server appliances.

IBM Corp. was the exception among the big hardware vendors in the U.S. last year, being the only company to see its share of revenue from overall server sales increase from the year before, according to data released Monday by Gartner Inc.

Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) announced Tuesday that a shareholder meeting to vote on the company's proposed merger with Compaq Computer Corp. will take place in mid-March.

Dell Computer Corp. is not the first company that comes into most users' minds when talking about supercomputers, but the company launched a new server clustering program Monday and a partnership with Cray Inc. to strengthen its position among vendors selling large groups of networked computers.

Sun Microsystems Inc. upgraded its Cobalt Qube server appliance line Monday, adding new security and management software along with faster processors to its hardware targeted at small and medium-sized businesses.

IBM Corp. on Monday released an update to its management software for Intel Corp.-based servers, giving users a host of new automation and error-checking tools that could help reduce administration costs.

Sun Microsystems rolled out the final test version of Solaris 9, offering a peek at new management, security and Linux-friendly features that will be included in the final version of the operating system, expected to be released mid-year.

Compaq Computer Corp. began shipping a new storage product Monday that brings some of the company's higher-end data protection tools down to a less expensive piece of hardware.