Compaq launched the Proliant 8000 and Proliant 8500 servers aimed at entities willing to network their spread-out branches like banks, Government departments and corporates at an entry price of Rs 20 lakh for the former. The Proliant 8500, which is the smaller kind of the two servers unveiled, will have an entry price of Rs 12 lakh.

``These servers will perform as good as other proprietary platforms at one third the price,'' Compaq India managing director Balu Doraisamy told newspersons here.

``We have not started price wars for servers, we have merely continued them from personal computers to the upper range,'' he added.

The company will also aim at Internet service providers and all those with large storage data applications like E-commerce, mail and messaging, data mining and warehousing for theseservers. ``The servers will be affordable and are rightly positioned for the Indian market with the networking boom bound to happen soon,'' Doraisamy added.

The cost of transaction per minute for Compaq servers will be $19 as against $57 for its nearest rival, industry standard servers division vice-president Paul Santeler said.

Developed in collaboration with leading chip maker Intel and launched worldwide a few days ago, the company claimed to have received over 120 beta customers and the first shipment in India is ``imminent,'' he added.

The servers provide linear scalability for eight-way processor servers, besides enabling customers currently deploying four processor servers to migrate to the eight processor systems. At entry level, Proliant 8000 will be available with two Pentium III Xeon 550 mhz processors, 512 kb of level 2 cache and 256 mb RAM. The Proliant 8500 will be available with one Pentium III Xeon 550 mhz processor, 512 kb of level 2 cache and 256 mb RAM.