Sequoia Systems Inc’s fault-tolerant Unix systems business needs a bit of tweaking in the unhelpful climate, and the Marlborough, Massachusetts company has added a new low-end model, the Series 40, which comes with up to four Motorola Inc 68040 microprocessors and has a starting price of under $160,000. The development of the Series 40 was jointly funded by Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, Seoul, South Korea. Users can upgrade from an entry-level Series 40 supporting 40 users to a top-of-the-line Sequoia Series 400 that can support thousands of users. The company has also enhanced the performance of the Series 400 by 30% to 40%. Hewlett-Packard Co, a Sequoia investor, distibution and technology development partner, is reselling the Series 40 as the HP 9000 Model 1210 into the telecommunications and health care markets. The machine incorporates new, more integrated and lower cost technology into the same symmetric multiprocessing architecture as the Series 400 and is designed to be cost-effective for between 40 and 400 active users. The processors are clocked at 25MHz with 256Kb of non-write-through cache, and they come with 16Mb to 192Mb memory, with support for up to 88Gb disk.
