By William Fellows
Hitachi Ltd this week lifts the lid on Trinium, its Skyline II bi-polar mainframes scaling to 16 processors and up to 3,000 MIPS performance using a new version of the hybrid ECL/CMOS chipset with copper connections called ACE/2. They’ll be available beginning in the third quarter with up to 12 CPUs; 16-ways in the first quarter of next year. Hitachi’s HDS group is touting the chipset’s performance as nearly twice that of its current products, or somewhere close to the 280 MIPS analysts have estimated compared with Skyline I’s 152 MIPS. IBM Corp’s current 10-way G5 CMOS mainframes perform at 1,065 MIPS, and its next generation G6 is expected to perform 40% better than that. Hitachi refers to IBM’s maxim that a users could replace two 100 MIPS boxes with a single 150 MIPS system to suggest that a user installing a 3,000 MIPS Trinium could effectively get rid of an aggregated 1,000 MIPS – but, more importantly, the associated software costs. A new global IP buffer offers a fourth layer of memory which can be shared across two IPs. Its bandwidth is twice that of CMOS, the company claims. Trinium supports IntraPlex, an implementation of the long-touted Sysplex-in-a-box. Hitachi says this offers clustering within a single image and the high- availability it offers means users can almost discount hardware as a point of failure. Computer Associates International Inc is to give Trinium’s virtual server facility (VSF) partitioning service a ringing endorsement by creating new services in its Unicenter TNG for OS/390 to support VSF which enable each virtual server to have its own serial number and model indentifier. More importantly, Hitachi says will incorporate the VSF pricing model into its software over time. It should ultimately mean lower software costs which Hitachi admits are killing users. It hopes CA’s endorsement will encourage other ISVs to adopt similar pricing. More details are due in April. One of Hitachi’s lawyers came up with the name Trinium. It’s supposed to convey three (thousand MIPS) and the millennium.
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