In a blog post today, Microsoft and Acer unveiled “the next wave of small business solutions” in the form of Acer’s AC100, a 4 bay microserver set to ship with the Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials OS.
The AC100 is a close cousin to the consumer-oriented RevoCenter RC100, previously revealed here at WGS. Both are cube-shaped, multi-bay, compact servers but internally, the specifications are quite different. To support a wide range of small business scenarios, the new AC100 is powered by a choice of Intel’s Xeon E3-1200 or Core i3 processors (as well as a budget Pentium option), up to 16GB ECC RAM support and Gigabit Ethernet. Storage expansion arrives courtesy of 6 USB 2.0 ports, plus eSATA support.
Acer’s SmartIT add-in suite integrates a range of business applications and features directly in the SBS Essentials 2011 Dashboard. These include:
- Acer Intel® vPro™ Management (for Xeon processors only)
- Acer Fax Notification
- Acer Printer Management
- Acer Health Monitoring
- Acer Power Scheduler
You can expect to see support for Intel “software RAID” (according to the specs), with RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 on offer.
Acer will be shipping the AC100 in a variety of configurations including OS support for Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials, Windows Server 2008, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP1. Pricing has not been revealed at this time.
Whilst Windows Home Server 2011 hardware support from major OEMs is looking decidedly thin, we’re expecting a different story when it comes to Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials. With solutions from HP and Acer now revealed, we should expect to see products from other manufacturers announced in due course.
More: Acer AC100 | Datasheet
