Norsk Data A/S vice-president Soren Voigt was in the UK last week at a customer open systems day at the company’s Benham Valence headquarters near Newbury in Berkshire. The occasion also marked the UK launch of Norsk’s Uniline 88 systems, introduced in Germany at Hannover last month, but on the market for over a year in Scandinavia. The Uniline 88 systems are a range of Motorola 88000-based high-end servers from the company’s Dolphin Server Technology A/S spin-off, and are the first to be certified at all levels in the 88open test suites. They are designed to act as servers for networks of hundreds or even thousands – of personal computers. Norsk Data sells on Acer Group Inc machines in its home market and Tulip Computers NV machines here in the UK. The machines, which up to four CPUs in parallel and intelligent controllers for input-output, disk and networking support, are rated at between 29 IBM MIPS and 173 MIPS, and have achieved a rating of 150 TP1s using the Sybase database. Voigt says the machines have been extremely successful in Scandinavia, but that he had wanted to build up the product line before introducing it abroad. The UK focus will be on local authorities, central government and manufacturing. Norsk Data now thinks of itself as a systems integrator, and now that it has converted just about all of its proprietary software to the new line, it hopes that many of its existing customers will be encouraged to migrate. To help, Norsk has built up a set of migration tools. Norsk has been active in the UK Unix market for two years, mostly selling re-badged boxes from Motorola Computer Systems, but so far it has not been big business. Last June, the company also entered into an OEM deal with Data General Corp for the 88000-based AViiON series.
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