Looking forward to the closure of its acquisition by Compaq Computer Corp, Digital Equipment Corp CEO Bob Palmer used the company’s Unix Summit event in New York yesterday to put Sun Microsystems Inc squarely in the cross hairs of the combined company, accusing Sun of ignoring customers with mixed system environments with its Unix-only product strategy, and citing studies which forecast 90% of customers will be using Unix and NT by 2000. Compaq’s acquisition of DEC is expected to close by the end of this quarter after a meeting of shareholders and Compaq CEO Eckhard Pfeiffer is supposed to detail a product strategy for the combined operation at June’s PC Expo show in New York. Meanwhile, Palmer said DEC’s little-endian Digital Unix for Alpha and IA-64 plus its well-established NT integration skills also put DEC far ahead of Hewlett-Packard Co’s recently announced Unix-NT integration solutions. Moreover DEC is currently looking at how to combine its Memory Channel-based TruCluster technology with the ServerNet-based NonStop interconnect from its Compaq cousin Tandem Computers Inc. Meantime DEC wheeled out a new four- way 4100 5/600 mid-range server using 600MHz 21164 parts starting at $78,000 and cut tags on its 800, 1200, 4100, 8200 and 8400 models by up to 20%. Pre-packaged TruCluster server solutions are available as Ready to Go Unix Clusters priced from $51,000. Under certain conditions DEC offers a guaranteed 99.99% uptime – or 53 minutes of unplanned downtime a year.
