Do you remember the first time?

Often considered the premium choice, unless you were scouring ebay or gumtree, you'd do well to buy an IBM system for less that £500. It appears, however, that this may no longer be the case with the news earlier this month that a pair of new, entry level systems will hit the market.

It's clear that the systems are aimed at first time server buyers, this is reflected when it comes to cost,  the x3100 M4 tower offering will retail from £430.00 Exc VAT. As you would expect, the x3250 M4 rack offering comes in slightly higher at a starting point of £975.00 for a basic config.

The tower box gives 32GB of memory capacity across 4 slots and will allow upto 12TB of storage using the new 3TB drives. The rack systems will provide identical memory but will allow only 6TB of internal storage across 2 hard drive slots. Those on a real budget will also be able to lower the base costs by opting for the pentium dual core processor option.

HP and Dell both have similar offerings which arrived earlier in the year, by simply logging onto the Dell site you can pick yourself up a basic power edge tower server for as little as £200.00.

A key differentiator for the IBM offerings are that they will use Intel's latest Sandy Bridge processors - the E3-1200. A model which it's claimed will offer a 30% uplift on previous models.

I'm still waiting to see these systems first hand and as of yet have no idea of any benchmarks, hopefully I'll have the chance to get  hands on in the coming months.