The UK’s electricity-carrying National Grid, jointly owned by the 12 distribution companies, is to be the first UK site to install a Sequent Computer Systems Inc Unix server running Novell Inc’s Parallel Enabled NetWare. Sequent developed the parallelised version of NetWare jointly with Novell and announced it last October, saying that it can support as many as 1,000 MS-DOS personal computers. Another UK site is also to be announced soon, claimed Sequent. The seven Unix-based file and application servers are to be managed by Data Sciences UK Ltd, Farnborough, Hampshire, which will also be providing support for the National Grid’s 500 personal computers on its distributed systems network. The contract is valued at #1m over two years. Data Sciences is the computing services company that was born out of the management buy-out of Thorn EMI Plc’s Thorn EMI Computer Software, and offers services using hardware from ICL Plc, IBM UK Ltd and NCR Corp. The National Grid is currently evaluating its computing strategy after Nynex Corp-owned consultant BIS Systems advised it that a relocation of its IBM mainframes would not be economical.
