Amdahl Corp is the latest mainframe shop to articulate a plan which will see its OS/390 mainframe, Unix and Windows NT operating systems hosted on a single system it plans to offer called Universal Server. At the same time Amdahl is dumping its 18-month-old EnVista NT servers and will instead resell its Fujitsu Ltd parent’s six-way Intel-based Teamservers as part of a plan which will see it become Fujitsu’s bridgehead for selling PC servers in North America. No-one at Amdahl was keen to talk about details of the Universal Server strategy. However the company did say it has been experimenting with OS/390 emulation on Intel processors. It says none of the product details have been nailed down and that the server won’t be on sale until after 2000. Similar single system strategies have already been developed by other proprietary mainframe shops including Unisys Corp and another Fujitsu sibling, ICL Plc. Amdahl says it’s dumping EnVista due to pricing pressure and manufacturing costs and that Teamserver and its use of the high-performance Champion I/O chipset from secretive Fujitsu unit Reliance Computer Corp will provide it with a route to Intel’s Slot 2 Deschutes architecture. Amdahl claims Teamserver and its use of Champion chipsets provide 1.5 times the performance of similar products in its class. It will bring over its EnVista Escon channel connect, LVS storage subsystem support, software clustering, high-availability and thin client support to Teamserver. It will support NT but not other operating systems such as SCO OpenServer or NetWare that Fujitsu Computer offers on the same boxes in Europe. Amdahl claims 500 one-to-four way EnVista units out at 200 customers and expects sales of PC servers to be worth as much as revenue from Unix system sales in future. In addition to mainframe UTS Unix Amdahl is also the biggest reseller of Sun Microsystems Inc’s high-end Starfire Ultra Enterprise 10000 servers. It’s also signed to sell Sun’s Solaris x86 of future Intel IA-64 systems.
