Steve Chen’s rather less ambitious new venture, Eau Claire, Wisconsin-based Chen Systems Inc, is touting its one-to-eight way servers, built around 133MHz Pentiums running Oracle (CI No 2,689) as commercial symmetric multiprocessing vehicles for data warehousing, decision support, on-line analytical processing and video and multimedia applications. The systems, which incorporate a dual PCI bus for parallel disk input-output, are claimed to deliver better performance as 100MHz eight-ways than a 20-way Sun Microsystems Inc Sparccenter 2000, though the company was unable to supply any figures. Chen Systems – actually founded by chief executive Chen in February 1993 – won backing from Singapore company MCSB in April 1994 and claims the US Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Mercedes as beta sites for systems it had up and running at the beginning of this year. Chen’s former company, Supercomputing Systems Inc, went under in 1992 when IBM Corp funding ran out. Cray Research bought its intellectual property. Chen will use Citrix Systems Inc and others for Windows NT on the boxes by end of the year.
