Amdahl Corporation, the mainframe subsidiary of Fujitsu, announced today that its Millennium family of CMOS mainframes, which are clones of IBM’s G4 and G5 series of 9672 S/390s, have been certified by ERP software giant SAP to run its R/3 applications. Fujitsu’s Teamserver line of Windows NT servers have already been certified by SAP to support the application suite. The Amdahl certification allows Millennium machines to support the central R/3 database or clustered databases in a giant R/3 setup; other Unix or NT servers actually run the R/3 application code and interface with end user client PCs. No mainframes – whether they are from IBM, Amdahl or Hitachi – are certified to run the R/3 applications suite, and it is unlikely that they will in the future. Amdahl, keen on pushing Millenniums as well as Fujitsu NT servers and Sun Starfire Unix servers, obviously feels it has the right equipment to ride the R/3 wave and give customers whatever choice they want for the application tier in their R/3 networks. Last week, Hitachi Data Systems announced that its Skyline bipolar and Pilot CMOS mainframe lines were certified to run R/3 databases as well. Both Amdahl and Hitachi machines need to run IBM’s DB2 database management system to support R/3; so far, no other DBMS software is supported on IBM mainframes as far as R/3 is concerned.
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