Sequent Computer reckons that the Microsoft Windows NT operating system is viable today over as many as 12 cpus, but there’s no database that is yet tuned to run at that level. Earlier this week, Sequent rolled out Oracle parallel server, but confirmed that its maximum configuration was currently on a four processor machine, although it promised an eight-way version in line with Oracle announcement by year end (CI No 3,159). Sequent was one of the first Unix hardware companies to support the original Unix version of Oracle parallel server way back in 1992, which now runs happily on Sequent machines from eight cpus to 30, and it was no surprise to see an early endorsement from Sequent now Oracle is intent on embracing NT. A Sequent spokesman admitted NT is not as mature or as scalable as Unix, but we’ve seen it running in eight, 10 and 12 way configurations and scaling well. It’s the databases that can’t scale at that level yet when they’re on NT. Looking ahead, Sequent said it would be testing NT on its NUMA range of machines next quarter, but a spokesman admitted: We really need Microsoft’s co-operation if there are any operating systems issues with that version. We can use the hardware abstraction layer to port it, but anything more than that Microsoft has to do. Microsoft had yet to make any commitments to NUMA. Sequent reckons it has had most success using Oracle parallel server in datawarehousing environments and hopes that the NT version will be no exception. We see Unix machines running the very large datawarehouse databases and perhaps divisional datamarts running on NT. NT will soon support hundreds of users and gigabytes of data, but not terabytes, he said. Sequent says it has installed 400 plus NUMA machines since their launch in December.
