Sequent Computer Systems Inc duly unveiled its new ‘Scorpion’ mid-range eight-way Unix servers as the NUMA-Q 1000 line, hoping the new configurations will cut it a new high-volume revenue stream from sales of systems which cost less than $1m (CI No 3,460). Around two thirds of Sequent’s bookings are for systems which cost over $1m. Sequent is offering a four-way 400MHz Pentium II Xeon Deschutes quad with 1Gb RAM for $93,600. The eight-way, comprising two quads and 2Gb RAM costs $188,700. Sequent is pitching them as cheaper alternatives to similarly- configured four- and eight-way Sun and HP servers and is touting NUMA-Q 1000 as the ideal platform for developing and prototyping applications which will ultimately be deployed on its NUMA-Q 2000 server with up to 64 CPUs. NUMA-Q 1000 will initially run Dynix/ptx Unix, though the company says once a customer has prototyped an application and moved it off to NUMA-Q 2000 a couple of instances of Windows NT could be installed. It’s not intended as an NT box per se – it’s not priced accordingly – neither is it the vehicle for Sequent’s ccNUMA Windows NT aspirations which are dependent on the arrival of Windows 2000 (NT 5), even though it has been working on supporting NT on its ccNUMA architecture for more than 18 months now. Sequent says it has effectively stripped out much of the high-end scaling and other overhead from NUMA-Q 2000 to create the new server which ships March 15. It was originally slated for the forth quarter.
