Data General Corp duly took the lid off its Aviion 2000 ccNUMA distributed shared memory servers and Clariion FC5000 Fibre Channel RAID systems yesterday (CI No 3,176). The AV 2000 can accommodate up to eight four-way SHV Pentium Pro boards linked with the Scalable Coherent Interconnect technology DG licensed from Dolphin Interconnect Solutions Inc. Each board comes with up to 512Kb cache, 4Gb RAM and 12 slots and can be connected with up to 128Mb distributed cache memory and 100Tb fibre channel RAID disk storage. A clustered configuration currently supports two 32-way systems; four node clustering will be supported from year- end. AV 2000s run a version of the company’s DG/UX Unix configured to support ccNUMA. Santa Cruz Operation Inc’s Gemini Unix will be available whenever SCO gets the ccNUMA-enabled version of its system software out of the door. SCO’s schedule for delivering regular Gemini code is by year-end, which means a ccNUMA-enabled version will be up on the DG servers sometime in 1998. It’s a kick in the teeth for DG and its OEM customers such as ICL Plc which had originally been promised a ccNUMA-enabled version of UnixWare for the servers as early as this quarter. AV 2000 prices start at $70,000 for a quad with 512Mb RAM. A 32- processor configuration is $690,000. QuickCluster configurations start at $300,000 for two four-processor systems with 1Gb RAM, 30-slot Clariion storage, software and services. The servers are targeted at retail, telecommunications, healthcare, energy and financial services industries. Volume deliveries begin late summer. DG also announced its Clariion FC5000 Fibre Channel RAID subsystem plus a SCSI-to-fibre channel adapter for use with the SCSI-based Series 3000 arrays. Third parties such as Hewlett- Packard Co and Silicon Graphics Inc are OEMing DG’s fibre channel products.
