As expected (CI No 2,279), Motorola Inc has started shipping the first of a series of new fault-tolerant Unix machines, based on its 40MHz 88110 RISC. The SeriesFT family is aimed primarily at the telecommunications market and related areas such as command and control systems for emergency services, and has been sold internally for about a year – the new boxes support the Signalling System No 7 telecommunications protocol for intelligent networks, primary and basic rate ISDN, X25, T1 and E1 fast packet circuits, frame relay, SNMP and CMIP as well as TCP/IP, Network File System and Remote Procedure Call, but the next step will be to integrate switching functionality into them. Motorola will now sell its new offerings via systems integrators, on the OEM market and via value-added resellers such as British Telecommunications Plc, GEC Plessey Telecommunications Ltd’s GPT Communications Systems, and L M Ericsson Telefon AB. It is also discussing network applications with such companies as Logica Plc and Electronic Data Systems Corp. Motorola reckons one of the main advantages of its systems over such rivals as Stratus Computer Inc’s is that they offer binary compatibility with its commercial Series 900 boxes and embedded MVME187-197 single board computers for use in such devices as intelligent switches in local telephone exchanges each of these systems run SV/88 R4, Motorola’s fault-tolerant version of System V.4, which includes fail-safe drivers, disk mirroring, a real-time user-controlled process scheduler, and a C and C++ development environment with a graphical debugger. They also support off-the-shelf Unix packages, such as billing systems, and all the major relational databases, including Oracle 7.0, Ingres 6.4 and Informix 5.0. The SeriesFT family comprises three models: the entry-level rack-mounted model 520, which has two CPU sets, each containing one 88110 chip with 256Kb of cache and up to 123Mb of memory, either 520Mb or 1Gb of disk, and 32 serial asynchronous input-output ports – the 520 starts at $114,100 or UKP83,643; the model 820 also has two CPU sets with 256Kb of cache and up to 256Mb of memory, 520Mb to 2Gb of disk, and up to 64 serial asynchronous input-output ports the 820 starts at $148,500 or UKP103,193; and the model 830, which has three CPU sets with 256Kb of cache and up to 256Mb of memory, 520Mb to 2Gb of disk, and up to 64 serial asynchronous ports – this top model starts at $227,700, UKP135,101. Motorola is also working on fault-tolerance for telemarketing with GPT, Mitel Corp and Datapoint Corp.
