Amdahl Corp duly announced its EnVista clustered Windows NT servers yesterday (CI No 2,909), saying it is positioning them at the high end business-critical application level with links to both the MVS mainframe and desktop. EnVista Central Server, which is designed to bridge the data center- to-workgroup gap, can be clustered to scale up to eight nodes of four Intel Corp Pentium Pro processors, connected to the mainframe via an Escon channel using Microsoft Corp’s SNA Server and coupled with Amdahl’s LVS 4500 RAID storage system. The company is mooting its possible use as a data warehouse gateway, to blast data down from the mainframe at high speed and then feed it through to the warehouse. The Frontline Server is designed for branch office workgroups and departments and is expandable up to four processors. Amdahl confirms it is sticking to commodity components such as the four-way Intel SHV Pentium Pro boards and Microsoft software. Pricing is not yet available. The company says it will use Microsoft’s WolfPack clustering APIs and leverage NT’s System Management Server to create a single system image for the servers. Amdahl says it expects there to be no decline in its Unix business as a result, and characterizes its NT effort as the opening of another front. Amdahl says it is co-developing a high speed mesh interconnect designed to cluster NT servers in non-ccNUMA arrangements. Amdahl also claims it is working with Intel on the design of a future 64-bit chip, but wouldn’t say whether it is the same chip Intel is working on in conjunction with Hewlett Packard Co, codenamed Merced. Amdahl predicts its mainframe business will drop to 40% of its total business from 65% now, but claims this rather reflects a faster growth of its other operations and not a net decline in mainframe revenues. Although it hasn’t previously offered NT, the company plans to leverage its relationship with customers which already buy its enterprise products. The large companies everyone wants to sell to are Amdahl’s customers today, the company says. Amdahl is confident it can still make money by moving from a high-margin field of large customers to a commodity-based business and says it will soon announce an indirect distribution strategy for some of its products, but was tight-lipped with details. Amdahl also says it will launch a Frontline server in six to nine months with redundant capabilities for failsafe data back up. The company wouldn’t say whether it is interested in being the final resting place for Cray Research Inc’s Sparc-based Superserver 6400 line, which new parent Silicon Graphic Inc is seeking to divest.
