Amdahl Corp is gearing up to pre-empt IBM Corp’s early April announcements with launches and announcements of its own on Tuesday. It is expected to trump IBM’s 10-way ES/9000 with a 12-way mainframe of its own, and to join forces with three international leaders in relational database and advanced processor technologies to create advanced, high value enterprise intelligence systems. It is believed that this refers to an alliance with Oracle Corp, massively parallel systems builder nCube Corp, and probably Sun Microsystems Inc to create an answer to IBM’s planned database query server. Amdahl says that systems developed under the alliance will dramatically impact the way large companies conduct business on a global basis. Separately, the Sunnyvale mainframer announced that it has gone to Data General Corp for an OEM agreement on its CLARiiON disk arrays, and has launched them as the Amdahl Series 3000, aiming them at the Sun Microsystems Sparccenter 2000 and Sparcserver 1000 that it markets itself, and also at IBM’s RS/6000 and at NetWare servers. Amdahl is also to work with Data General on advanced data storage and data management technologies, starting with further optimisation of performance and availability of the CLARiiON arrays in Sun environments. The arrays support RAID levels 0, 1, 3, 5, and 1/0 concurrently, have two 20M-byte per second interfaces and 64Mb mirrored cache, coming in 5Gb to 40Gb capacities in a single cabinet. A minimum configuration with five 1Gb drives is $22,900. A fully configured cabinet with 64Mb of mirrored cache and 40Gb of disk storage, is $115,500. Amdahl also announced five new services for open systems client-server environments – client-server needs assessment, client-server network design and optimisation, client-server migration planning, open systems installation and training, and systems integration.
