Comparex Informationssysteme GmbH is the first of Hitachi’s IBM compatible mainframe resellers to announce plans for logical partitioning of its machines, and has also announced new models; an announcement is also expected from National Semiconductor’s National Advanced Systems this week. The logical partitioning concept was invented by Amdahl Corp, which calls it Multiple Domain Feature, and was copied by IBM with its PR/SM feature on the 3090s. Comparex says it intends to develop a similar facility for its 7/90 and 8/8x machines, which, it says, already have 3090E facilities such as processor identification and expanded storage. It is also committed to supporting Enterprise Systems Architecture capabilities for the two families, and will put dates on the development before the end of the year. The Mannheim joint venture between BASF AG and Siemens AG also announced new optical channels for the two families, enabling disk drives to be stored up to 3,000 feet from the processor. The channels will operate at 3Mbytes-per-second, or 6Mbps using the Hitachi disk drives that can transfer data at that rate; non data streaming devices with lower transfer rates can be installed up to a mile from the processor; the 8/8x machines will support up to four of the channels, the 7/90 up to 48 for the top models. Testing shipments will be made in first quarter 1989, with staged availability starting in the second quarter. And the company completes tod ay’s announcement with two dual processor models in the 7/90 line, the 7/90-11 being a multiprocessor version of the 7/90-1 and the 7/90-22 a multiprocess or 7/90-2; dyadic versions of the machines are al ready available as the 7/90-3 and 7/90-4, offering approximately the same power as the new ones. The 7/90 processors are built of ECL circuitry switching at 200pS, supp orted by CMOS arrays with up to 40,000 gates – and 1M memory chips.
