Data General also demonstrated new high-availability features of its DG/UX 5.4 Release 3 operating system. These include automatic rapid recovery, de-configuration of failed components, automatic re-booting and automatic fault reporting. Storage management, threads support, and improved symmetrical multi-processing are also included, with the company claiming linear performance increases when adding processors through use of multi-level caching. Steve Gardner, vice-president of AViiON marketing says the new systems should perform at around the following transaction per second rates using the TPC-A benchmark (not officialy audited yet): two-way – 120 tps; four-way – 210 tps; eight-way – 500tps; 12-way – 750 tps; 16-way – 1,000 tps. These are single systems say Gardner, not clusters like Sequent’s 1,000 TPC-As using Oracle: Data General plans clustering enhancements later this year and has great hopes for the Oracle Parallel Server. The two and four processor systems will use 45MHz 88110s with 256Kb secondary cache. Within six months – and by the time the 12-and 16-way systems are available – they’ll be using 50MHz kickers with 1Mb cache. Data General expects 8500 to be the volume leader and is pitching that against Sun’s Sparcserver 1000s. It has been optimised for Oracle, but both Oracle and Sybase are being re-written to support threads. In fact the 9500s an 8500s have been shipping for the last 75 days, Gardner says, as the AV8400 and AV7400 respectively, without the 88110 CPU boards, so they just get a board-swap. Data General is looking at enhancements Motorola has for the 88110 as well as five or six other RISCs for future use. Indeed it’s already converted DG/UX for several others, including the PowerPC, for evaluation. It’ll put up Distributed Computing Environment later this year, and Tivoli Systems Inc’s distributed management framework when Unix System Laboratories Inc has completed its work on the stuff. Computer Associates’ CA-UniCenter will be up on AViiONs by the end of the year too. He claims the Omron workstation is the result of joint development, and that the Data General versions are being manufactured in the US, although it sounds as if Omron’s in the driving seat. Markets for the workstations are commercial geographic information systems, software development and as packaged systems to front-end the servers, the firm says.
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