ICL Plc has revealed the next steps in its ongoing plans to unify its hardware range around a single Intel Corp platform under the Trimetra brand. Next month the company plans to ship a Pentium Pro-based Trimetra server that it will market as the first commodity box to support mainframe, Unix and NT operating systems, either singly or in combination. It’s the beginning of the road towards ICL’s so-called Millennium server effort, which will eventually add advanced clustering mechanisms including ccNUMA. The Millennium server may even start out using a second turn of Intel Corp’s IA-64 architecture called McKinley rather than Merced, the 64-bit part due late 1999. The Trimetra DY, to be launched next month, runs ICL’s mainframe OpenVME operating system on one processor, input-output on another, and SCO UnixWare or Windows NT on the remaining four, or eventually six processors. The box is its Fujitsu ICL Systems sister company’s SMP TeamServer, to which it has added software for partitioning disk storage – it doesn’t share data between environments – and is creating higher-level common system and application management facilities. The OpenVME node will perform 6.5 mainframe MIPS officially, though anyone that asks will be told it can go to eight and privately the company expects to wring 10 MIPS out of it. Instead of the straight emulation for OpenVME that DY uses on the 32-bit Pentium Pro, the 64-bit Millennium server will utilize more advanced binary mechanisms to make the 42-bit OpenVME run faster. The box is designed for use by the 400-odd low-end OpenVME SX mainframe users who are likely to be first to want to use commodity hardware to run their existing applications alongside Unix and NT. ICL says most early users are interested in finding out how their OpenVME applications perform on Intel. The SY Trimetra – effectively ICL’s proprietary CMOS mainframe with an Intel co-processor for running Unix or NT – will reach 16-way, 400 MIPS configurations this summer as a four-by-four way. For its pure Unix play ICL OEMs Unisys Corp’s 10-way Aquanta server as the Trimetra XtraServer that will be expanded to 32-way through this year. It swaps Unisys’ storage for Data General Corp’s AviiON disk. It’s evaluating the usual crop of interconnect hardware to provide ccNUMA functionality and says it will plump for one as late as possible to see which way the industry blows. It will get ccNUMA UnixWare from Santa Cruz Operation Inc as part of its recent cash and technology investment in the company. It knows it has bet the company on the right CPU for the future and hopes its choice of Unix will also prove to be the winner. It figures SCO’s chances are largely in the lap of Compaq Computer Corp, SCO’s biggest reseller. If Compaq continues with UnixWare rather than – or alongside – the Digital Unix it has acquired with DEC, then SCO’s future is assured ICL thinks. The best current guess is that Compaq will win some kind of Digital Unix API accommodation within SCO – something which SCO is already said to be amenable to. SCO says discussions with Compaq and DEC are continuing.
