Intel Corp’s ubiquitous Standard High Volume (SHV) PentiumPro boards are quickly spawning a market for commodity Unix SMP server technology. Today, Data General Corp is expected to reveal Unisys Corp as the latest convert to its flavor of Non-Uniform Memory Access system design whilst Unisys will license its 533Mbps Synchronous Coherent Memory (SCM) bus to Data General. Unisys is to use DG’s NUMA backplane design and software plus Scalable Coherent Interconnect boards to link Intel’s four-way SHV cards in future versions of its ClearPath 61000 SMP server line. Unisys expects to ship its first NUMA systems right behind DG, whose own NUMA-enabled PentiumPro AViiON servers are due around year-end. Unisys says it hasn’t worked out upgrade issues yet. Unisys uses SCM to create mix-and-match non-NUMA Pentium/PentiumPro 61000 servers with up to 10 CPUs. SCM works in conjunction with Unisys’ Sierra-Pro board design and DG will use the bus to build PentiumPro versions of its eight-way, non-NUMA Pentium-based AV5800 servers. Both companies’ NUMA lines will be running UnixWare and Santa Cruz Operation Inc’s future Unix operating system blend. Indeed, Unisys says that, in future, all of its Unix development work will be carried out in conjunction with SCO; the two have signed what they say is a strategic relationship agreement for ongoing joint engineering and support. Unisys’ own Unix SVR4.MP implementation will give way to SCO’s OEM product over
time, though Unisys says it’ll support the systems software until the end of the century. UnixWare 2.1 is now up on all of Unisys’ ClearPath SMP servers. DG’s still committed to its own DG-UX where it’s required. The two companies say they’ll beat competitive RISC solutions on price/performance though how they’ll differentiate their increasingly similar products from each other is unclear. Both say they’ll be going after their installed bases to begin with. Unisys claims a benchmark record of 6,253 tpmC ($303.80 per tpmC) running Oracle 7.3.2 on a 10-way 150MHz Pentium server running SCO UnixWare 2.1.
