Compagnie des Machines Bull SA today announced availability of its mainframe-class Sagister Unix boxes as similar offerings from Sun Microsystems Inc, IBM Corp, Unisys Corp and ICL loom on the horizon. Bull is calling the AIX Unix-based boxes multiframes and promises they will consolidate applications from multiple distributed Unix servers onto the single Sagister platform with mainframe characteristics and also help data centers evolve with interoperability features to link existing systems with new tools. Formerly codenamed Madison, the product’s already shipped in Europe and will cost from $700,000 for six to eight processors, to $2m for 24 to 32 processors. The hardware is built on Bull’s Escala platform based on SMP PowerPC technology and uses PowerPC 604 133MHz chips. It comes with about 20 software packages from Bull including ISM/OpenMaster – an object-oriented network and security enterprise management suite – and other facilities and applications components. Bull will initially target Sagister at its installed base, IBM MVS sites and AIX users.
