Amdahl Corp yesterday formally launched the first products in its Xplorer 2000 series of parallel processing database servers conceived in response to IBM Corp’s parallel query server and put together with the help of Oracle Corp, nCube Inc and Information Builders Inc (CI No 2,385). It also introduced new consulting and support services to help users adapt the technology to new and existing database applications. The Xplorer 2000 line currently consists of the Model 50 and Model 100: the boxes are nCube massively parallel systems running Oracle7 and uses Information Builders EDA/SQL access software. The Xplorer 2000 servers can be configured as System/390 channel-attached database offload processors for DB2 dynamic SQL queries with support for up to eight concurrent channels. It can also be accessed via SQL calls from client-server environments, via Ethernet or an FDDI backbone network, and the two environments can co-exist. The Model 50 comes with 32 to 64 processor nodes and 10Gb to 80Gb disk. Processor nodes can be added in 16-node increments and disk in 10Gb increments. The Model 100 has 64 to 512 processor nodes and 48Gb to 1.176Tb. First deliveries are planned for the fourth quarter, and prices start at $1m. Enhancements planned for first half 1995 include support for Escon channels and RAID technology; enhanced back-up and restore features and processes; system management facilities; and bulk loading from data sources other than DB2 and Oracle, the company promised.
