Data General Corp shot its flagship MV minicomputer line up the performance scale yesterday with launch of a new top-end symmetric four-processor machine that it rates at 50 MIPS, and accompanied it with a new release of the AOS/VS operating system that confers a degree of fault-tolerance on the machines. The company was able to reveal first-day orders fro 50 machines, worth $30m, but the impact was a little reduced by the fact that one of the contracts is already announced: $20m of that $35m contract for the French Service Technique de la Navigation Aerienne (CI No 1,024) is for the new machines. There is a little inflation in the numbering system too: we’d suggested an MV/30000, Electronic News went for an MV/25000 but in the even it’s the Eclipse MV/40000 and MV/40000 HA for High Availability. The machines are built around a new high-speed data highway subsystem called the Message-based Reliable Channel. The company says the Data-Sharing Architecture supported by the new CPU is especially designed for transaction-oriented applications, implementing a client-server system in which one machine acts as a server for a community of one or more systems directly supporting users. The new machine comes with one to four processors, the uniprocessor being rated at 14 MIPS, supporting up to 1,024 terminals and 128Mb; the MV/40000 HA-4, with up to 256Mb memory, supports over 3,000 terminals. Data General reckons the HA-4 offers over twice the performance of DEC’s four CPU VAX 8840 and IBM’s 4381-24, making it the most powerful general purpose supermini around. The HA-4 is also rated at 75 transactions per second on the ET-1 Debit-Credit benchmarks. The Message-based Reliable Channel subsystem for networking client server MV systems runs at 400Mbps – 40 times the rated speed of Ethernet. The new AOS/VS II release offers the new resilient features, including a fail-safe data filing system. Prices for the MV/40000 and HA modlels go from under $500,000 to over $2m. First MV/40000 ships start before year-end, with the HA models following in the first quarter 1989.
