DEC is expected to make its assault on the foothills of IBM’s Sierra mainframes on Tuesday with the introduction of two models of a new top-end VAX 8900 multiprocessor that is tipped to offer 50 times the performance of the VAX-11/780, or 50 MIPS. The 8900 is expected to come in two models, 8974 and 8978, the latter thought to be a four-processor machine running under a true multiprocessing release of VMS. The announcement is also expected to include a VAX/SQL implementation for IBM’s relational Structured Query Language. The machine is expected to be pitched clearly at the high-volume commercial transaction processing market where IBM’s offerings, although dominant, are regarded as expensive and inefficient. The VAX 8900s are also expected to be accompanied by a new disk sub-system, the 2.5Gb SA482, made up of four 632Mb drives.
