InformationWeek

The E800's predecessor, the E60, offered just 1 Gbyte of memory and didn't have a universal serial bus. But the E800 offers up to 2 Gbytes of memory and has two USB ports. The E800 includes an application for faster, easier recovery of data stored on tape drives.

The E800 can accommodate Ultra3 SCSI drives with up to 145 Gbytes of data, and has seven PCI slots, two of which are 64-bit. In addition, the E800 is offered with up to two Intel Pentium III 733-MHz, 800-MHz, or 866-MHz processors; the E60 was limited to dual Pentium 500-MHz processors.

"The E800 targets companies that are on a big growth curve, have a simple local area network and don't have full-time IT support," says Carlo Delumpa, product manager for HP's NetServer.

Omnibility, a small E-business consulting firm in Campbell, Calif., was a beta tester for the E800 and uses it to run Windows 2000 and two Web applications. Through a virtual private network, the E800 exchanges content with a server at a branch office in San Francisco that specializes in multimedia and graphics design. "The server gives us the extra processing power to handle multiple applications," says Daniel Shue, E-services and Internet strategist for Omnibility. "It allows us to transfer graphics files with up to 40 Mbytes between offices. We couldn't do that before."

The E800 runs on Windows Small Business Server, NT 4.0, and 2000; Linux 6.2; Novell NetWare 4.2 and 5.0; and Skull 5.0. Pricing starts at $2,060.