Data warehousing programmes are all the rage at the moment. Pyramid Technology Corp and its Siemens-Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG parent certainly don’t want to look out of place and have fashioned themselves a SmartWarehouse implementations initiative, establishing data warehouse test drive centres in San Jose and Frankfurt, with facilities in Brussels, Munich, Johannesburg and Hong Kong due over the next 12 months. A SmartStart option promises to deliver an operational and benchmarked pilot system within 90 days. They have partnered a crop of the usual suspects for databases, middleware and other services. The two claim to have a 100 data warehouse customers under their belts. They also claim to have 20 customers for their Reliant RM1000 parallel system, which uses Pyramid’s Meshine interconnect, the largest with six nodes (for a total of 36 CPUs). Informix’s scalable database offering will go into beta test on Reliant within the next 90 days although there is no time-frame for Sybase MPP. The two companies are still in the process of integrating and rationalising their respective pre-nuptial Unix lines into a single product family. By mid-1996 they promised a single Spec 1170-compliant Unix. They are currently integrating commands, libraries and other functions, a single Unix-based hardware line, plus MIPS R10000-based boxes, although not all at the same time and not necessarily in that order. By that time, peripherals and other devices will be common across these and Siemens Nixdorf’s iAPX-86 and BS2000 mainframe lines (the mainframes are also destined to go R10000). Meantime the companies plan to introduce PCI bus offerings into their existing lines later this year. As far as their future Unix requirements are concerned, the two say they would like to see two or three unspecified vendor-based workgroups doing development for Unix technologies in particular areas, including commercial massively parallel processing and fault-tolerance.
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