Hitachi Data Systems Corp, Santa Clara, California, will lift the lid on its long-awaited plan to buy, build or borrow PowerPC technologies during the second week of October, according to US sources, Unigram.X hears. It is preparing to lay out a complete multi-environment server strategy over the next six months that will include Unix and Windows NT environments running on iAPX-86 as well as PowerPC and Power2 architectures, spanning data centre-to-deskside configurations. Hitachi Data, still focused almost exclusively on its IBM Corp mainframe-compatible business, is looking to generate a third of its revenue from the new open systems lines within three years, forecasting its mainframe IBMulator business will remain flat over the same period. The April 1994 agreement with IBM gave Hitachi Data parent Hitachi Ltd the option to do everything from designing its own PowerPC chips to re-badging IBM kit and building its own systems. The brass in Tokyo has been thrashing out a game plan ever since, which may or may not accommodate Hitachi’s existing arrangement with Hewlett-Packard Co under which it has been selling Precision Architecture RISC-based parallel systems in Japan as the SR2001, or HMPP 1 as well as other Hewlett servers. Hitachi, which has been evaluating IBM’s SP2 parallel systems in-house for some time, is expected to begin selling them very soon as the SR series via its Hitachi Data units worldwide. Specific configurations apparently include one tailored for video-on-demand and there’ll be a heavy emphasis on Oracle databasing and middleware across the new lines. Meantime those with good eyes and ears – and brave hearts – may pick up details of what’s in store at the quadrennial Telecom ’95 in Geneva next month, where the video-on-demand system, and an office media server, go on show.
