Back in July, Tandem Computers Inc teased the world with a cryptic statement that it had signed an alliance with a major computer company on development of Windows NT servers (CI No 2,711) – and that major company of course turns out to be NEC Corp (CI No 2,742), as we suggested in July (among a list of about half a dozen other possibilities). The agreement calls for the two to develop top-end servers for the Microsoft Corp operating system using the R10000 variant of the MIPS Technologies Inc RISC; Tandem will also take NEC’s existing R-series RISC-based NT servers and workstations OEM, marketing them under its own name. We are so excited by the deal: Windows NT is a huge market, and it will be the only computer market, Tandem Computer’s president Jim Treybig said at the announcement in Tokyo. NEC said shipments of the jointly-developed servers will begin next summer.Tandem’s key contribution to the effort is its ServerNet high-speed interconnect. Described in detail in CI No 2,710, ServerNet is described as a System Area Network for interconnecting elements in a parallel processing complex. It uses packet-switching routers to connect any two elements of the system – CPUs, storage, communications and so forth, together without processor intervention. Tandem will begin marketing models of NEC’s Express servers in October, and is budgeting to sell 4,000 over the next two years – NEC says it has so far sold 9,500 of its Express servers in Japan and the US since they were introduced in November 1994. The agreement for Tandem to market the Express machines threatens to make its Windows NT product line rather crowded, because just a day before it teased us by foreshadowing the NEC deal without naming the partner, it announced a letter of intent with NeTpower Inc to market that firm’s R4400-based NT workstations and servers (CI No 2,709).
