NCR Corp has now announced its plans for Teradata Corp once its acquisition of the El Segundo back-end database processor manufacturer is complete – and Teradata announced a new communications processor for the DBC/1012. Under the plan, deliveries, enhancements and full product support for both the DBC/1012 and the NCR System 3600 will continue, but the upgrade path for users of both will be the NCR System 3700, which relies on Teradata technology. The new Teradata DBC/1012 Model 4 Communications Processor uses the Intel Corp 80486 microprocessor to provide nearly twice the performance in client-server applications that use the DBC/1012; when used with the new TCP/IP Ethernet adaptor, the Model 4 supports as many as 120 sessions, compared with the 60 supported by the Model 3, reducing per-session cost by 25%. The Communications Processor enables users to access data in the DBC/1012 directly from a personal computer, workstation or minicomputer, using a variety of graphical user interfaces, and spreadsheets, query tools and object-oriented development environments may also be used to implement executive information, decision support and transaction processing systems without going to the mainframe to access the data. The Model 4 hardware is $80,000, software is $15,000 and Ethernet Adaptors start at $5,000. All three are out now. Upgrade kits for Model 3 users are $45,000 and the software is $5,650. The Model 4 version of the DBC/1012 will be enhanced later this year woth an Applications Processor that will add general purpose Unix processing capabilities and for the support of other parallel databases, and it will support a disk array as an option. The performance of the DBC/1012 is also to be upgraded with use of 66MHz versions of the 80486.
