Bull SA picked a bad day to announce in Paris yesterday the culmination of a major development effort that shoots its DPS 7000 mainframe line up-market with two new high-end CMOS systems – up to now it has used Current Mode Logic in its fastest models, with a six-processor fault-tolerant model at the top of the line. It has three new families – the DPS 7000/700, which comes in a six-, a four- and two dual-processor models and features full redundancy, with a performance range of 70 to 260 debit-credit transactions a second. Prices start at about $2.5m, rising to about $8.5m. A new DPS 7000/500 line comes with three uniprocessors rated at 35 to 70 transactions a second. At the bottom end there is a new server model, the DPS 7000A, which comes in single or dual processor versions, takes up to 16Mb and supports up to 256 users. It costs from $80,000. The company’s new CMOS arrays integrate the equivalent of 500,000 transistors, and the new machines offer five times the power of the existing DPS 7000s. Bull is stressing use of the Oracle relational database, integrated with the TDS Transaction-Driven System on the new machines – it says Oracle can support up to 1,000 users on the largest model, and there is also a new release of the GCOS7 operating system.
