Pyramid Technology Corp, which is preparing a return to the limelight with the launch of what it calls third generation RISC hardware on July 14, has expanded its UK operations in a bid to win business from London’s finance and business institutions. Pyramid claims to offer a cheaper alternative to fault-tolerant vendors by offering data resilient systems, including a mirror disk facility which automatically duplicates files on separate physical disk partitions or in main memory, and resynchronises a replacement in the event of disk failure. Also included is a battery back-up facility to protect against power failures, and the ability to run dual machines, ports, Ethernets and databases by using a hardware switch. Guy Norgrove, manager of Pyramid’s Finance Busines Unit, said the company would guarantee uptime of 99.6% within the contractual period, at a substantially lower cost than the specialist fault-tolerant hardware vendors. The first order has come from investment bank County NatWest, which is to replace its current DEC PDP-11 systems with a Pyramid 9820 supporting 280 terminals. The existing Quasar software (from Apricot Computers) will run under what Pyramid claims to be the first symmetrical multiprocessing implementation of Mumps. Norgrove said that the widely-used Quasar and Comshare financial systems packages were initial software requirements, but that the future would lie in the sophisticated analytical tools and graph ical representations of finacial statistics now beginning to be used on Wall Street. These are leading to databases running into tens of gigabytes, said Norgrove, who predicted that the financial sector would be responsible for 25% of the company’s total UK business of some UKP3m to UKP4m over the next year.
