NetFrame Systems Inc, based in Sunnyvale, California, has announced the UK launch of its NetFrame range – network servers on microcomputers that are based on Intel 80386 chips. The company was set up two years ago by Carlton Amdahl to plug what he saw as the gap in customised network servers in the personal computer-based local area network environment. Since it was set up in 1987, the company has raised around $17m in private funding. Dataquest market research analysts forecast that by 1993 there will be 60m personal computers on desks and of these 30m will be networked. The NetFrame products are intended to provide mainframe capacity coupled with personal computer flexibility. The low-end NF100 system can generate three times the throughput of a high-end personal computer server system. NetFrame intends its range to compete head-to-head with Compaq’s Systempro. But NetFrame claims that under the NetFrame DX benchmark, a measurement tool devised by (surprise, surprise) NetFrame, its range outperforms the Systempro in disk throughput for random and sequential read and write access. In both cases, running a NetFrame and a Systempro with one controller and four drives, the NetFrame achieved around twice the throughput of the Systempro. NetFrame also says that the NF100 has around four times the disk throughput of a fully configured Systempro, while the NF300 has eight times the performance. The range runs Unix System V.4, NetWare 386, Banyan Vines and OS/2 LAN Manager. The NF100 retails at UKP16,000, the NF300 at UKP26,000 and the NF400 at UKP36,000. In the UK the NetFrame range is exclusively distributed by Businessland Ltd.
