Compagnie des Machines Bull SA is due to unveil new generations of its DPS 9000 and DPS 7000 mainframes today, using 0.35 micron CMOS processors and new versions of its GCOS 8 and GCOS 7 operating systems that support all the latest open systems buzzwords and year 2000 compliance. They include ten new DPS 9000/700 machines, the result of research and development codenamed Jupiter done jointly with NEC Corp, and 17 new DPS 7000/MT models, named Artemis. The DPS 9000/700s symmetrical multiprocessors scale to up to eight CPUs, for performance levels of around 1,270 transactions per second, and run GCOS 8 software release 4500, a new release supporting interoperability with Unix and Windows NT, communications via the Internet, client-server applications development and TCP/IP. NEC Corp already has five Jupiter systems up and running at customer sites in Japan, where they run its own ACOS-6 operating system. There are upgrade paths for existing DPS 9000/500 and 800 users, while existing high-end DPS 9000/900 boxes can be clustered together with the new systems. The DPS 7000 systems also launched today are called the DPS 7000/MT, and replace the current C, D and M Series 7000 series machines. They scale up to 16 symmetrical multiprocessing CPUs, and can support up to 19,200 simultaneous users, says the company. There is a new version eight release of GCOS 7, which includes Bull’s SQL Multi Technology so that GCOS 7 users can share data between Oracle, Informix or SQL Server databases on Unix or Windows NT systems. Peripherals can also be shared with Unix boxes. So-called customer dedicated processors can be set to work on single specific software environments, such as Internet, TCP/IP, data warehousing or batch processing. All GCOS systems running new versions of the operating systems will be year 2000 compliant once the roll-out is completed at year-end, says Bull, though first customer shipments begin next month. Prices, from the Bull HN Information Systems Inc arm in Billerica, Massachusetts, range from $650,000 to $4.5m. Bull, which still has 3,000 large customers worldwide for its GCOS ranges, says it already has 30 orders from the banking, insurance, retail, manufacturing and public sectors. Investment in GCOS will continue, with more powerful systems due over the next two years.
