There’s mixed news this week for users of the parallel architectures AT&T Co inherited with its acquisition of NCR Corp, which form the high end of the company’s latest packaged systems. AT&T Global Information Solutions vice-president Andre Dahan told out sister paper Unigram.X that next-generation BYnet parallel interconnect technology for hooking hundreds or thousands of processor units together, the basis of the long-overdue System 3700, will be fully operational by June 1995 but it will be the end of the year at least before it is integrated into boxes. Users of the commercially successful Teradata DBC/1012 back-end database engine bought by NCR in 1992, as well as users of NCR’s own moderately parallel System 3600, were originally promised a migration route to an all-new Teradata-based 3700. Instead of fork-lifting users up to a 3700 system, AT&T Global instead positioned 3700 technologies as a series of 3600 enhancements and began closing the Teradata door. New parallel customers are steered to 3600s. Dahan says the 3700 will feature one kind of node architecture, the same iAPX-86-based technology found up and down its System 3000 line and will operate with existing and new configurations of nodes that will be announced at the same time. DBC/1012 nodes will be history, but the Teradata database will continue to be supported. From December 1 AT&T will put it up on Unix-based 3500 symmetric multiprocessing boxes lower down the 3000 line. The latest Enterprise Information Factory systems and the 3700 will, according to Dahan, be offered with Windows NT. AT&T claims 450 parallel installations at 250 sites. Higher speed versions of the existing Ynet interconnect, Teradata database Release 1.5.1, Pentium Access Module Processors, 3.5 disk storage technology and more are still anticipated as 3600 Release 3 next year, followed by Teradata 1.6, Oracle 8.0 and Asynchronous Transfer Mode as 3600 release 4 thereafter. It sees parallel implementations of Oracle, Informix, Sybase and Teradata across symmetric multiprocessing and massively parallel lines, but not of CA-Ingres.
