Up-to-the-minute news on Sun's rivals
August 1997
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Up-to-the-minute news on Sun's rivals |
August 1997
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Both companies will contribute a multimillion dollar amount to a joint worldwide marketing fund and closely cooperate on engineering, service and support, and testing of Compaq's servers running SCO's UnixWare operating system, company officials said.
The effort is driven by the desire to gain more enterprise customers for the platform, which right now is being sold mostly to small- to medium-sized businesses, said Ed Black, senior vice president and general manager Americas at SCO, based in Santa Cruz, CA.
The two companies will also try to recruit more independent software developers to Compaq-Intel-based servers running SCO's UnixWare and the forthcoming upgrade code-named Gemini, Black said.
As a result of the extended relationship with SCO, Compaq hopes it can grow its Unix sales.
"About 10 to 20 percent of our server sales are now on Unix," said Mike Perez, Compaq's vice president of server products. "We want to grow that by 10 percent over the next several months and by 20 percent over the next two years. And the more growth we generate the more it feeds into the marketing engine."
The alliance announced today includes several key initiatives including:
--Torsten Busse, IDG News Service, San Francisco Bureau
The Compaq ProLiant 7000 and Compaq ProLiant 6500 servers feature Compaq's PCI Hot Plug technology which allows for replacement of failed PCI peripheral boards without powering down the server and interrupting services, said John Rose, enterprise computing group senior vice president and group general manager at Compaq.
The PCI Hot Plug technology has been licensed to Intel Corp. and will be available to all of Compaq's competitors, Rose said.
"We aren't taking the Sun [Microsystems Inc.] route and developing a very proprietary product," Rose said, taking a pot shot at server competitor Sun, which this week is rolling out new servers targeted at the workgroup market.
With the two new servers Compaq is demonstrating that Windows NT can cut it as a high-end enterprise network operating system, Rose said.
"Some say NT is not scaleable enough," Rose said at a press conference held here today. "We are demonstrating that we can guarantee uninterrupted data flow throughout the enterprise with that type of product."
Aside from Windows NT the servers also run under Novell Inc.'s NetWare and InternetWare, The Santa Cruz Operation's UnixWare, Banyan Systems Inc.'s Vines, and IBM's OS/2 operating systems.
Both servers are built around four Intel 200-MHz Pentium Pro processors, with 1 megabyte of Level 2 cache memory for faster instruction processing, and 512 kilobytes of cache memory support. In addition the new servers feature integrated Wide-Ultra SCSI-3 drives for faster data transfer and dual 10/100 megabit-per-second auto-sensing of network interface cards.
Additional features of the servers include Compaq Insight Manager administration software, which provides for monitoring, analysis and pre-failure alerts; hot-plug redundant power supplies and fans; and support for redundant NICs and Smart 2 Array Controllers.
Migration support for eight processors is included with the ProLiant 7000, while the chassis allows for upgrade and expansion of up to 4 gigabytes of memory, 11 I/O slots, including five PCI Hot Plug slots; and up to 18 disk drives that can be configured with up to 109.2 gigabytes of internal storage.
The rack-mounted, ProLiant 6500 designed for settings with a minimum of floor space, is available in a 12.25-inch form factor that enables customers to fit up to six servers into Compaq's 42U, 19-inch rack cabinet, occupying less than 2.5 square feet of space.
The servers also support clustering software including Microsoft's Cluster Server, Tandem Computer Inc.'s Eclipse, and Novell's Wolf Mountain.
Available now worldwide the ProLiant 6500 in the U.S. is priced starting at $14,735, while the ProLiant 7000 starts at $16,935.
--Torsten Busse, IDG News Service, San Francisco Bureau
Visualize, which has a highly-distributed graphics architecture featuring geometry acceleration based on PA-RISC floating-point technology, lets designers perform real-time 3-D modeling tasks, HP officials said.
Pentium II-based PC workstations running Visualize will rival the performance of high-end Unix systems, HP claimed, and will triple the graphics performance of current Windows NT-based workstations. NT workstations with Visualize will compete with Silicon Graphics Inc.'s Onyx 2 workstations, HP said.
The new systems will be available in the third quarter for approximately US$20,000, officials said. In line with the company's strategy to embrace both NT and Unix, HP will continue to offer Visualize on its Unix workstations as well.
--Kristi Essick, IDG News Service, London Bureau
As customers choose the Internet as their framework for business computing, "the challenge in front of us is enterprise and Internet meeting," said Phyllis Byrne, vice president of Distributed Systems Services at IBM's Software Solutions Division.
To that end, IBM is currently rolling out DSSeries, software which includes LDAP-based directory services designed to provide network-wide naming and location of resources over IP networks; an Internet security service which offers key-based authentication, access control and global encryption; and cross-platform availability services for applications, including clustering and replication.
In addition to the DSSeries X.500 Directory Server, announced in April and available running on an IBM RS/6000 on the AIX operating system, IBM's DSSeries plans include the following:
DSSeries blends together the directory services and security features which businesses transitioning to electronic business require, according to Byrne.
"Not until today [have we] coherently tied together our directory and security work," Byrne said. "Today is the beginning of that rollout."
--Rebecca Sykes, IDG News Service, Boston Bureau
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