Having sold its Unix computer systems side to Hewlett-Packard Co a couple of years ago, Texas Instruments Inc is getting back into the systems business with Sparcstations designed specifically for use by phone companies. Texas now has a Sparcstation that is designed to be compliant with the Network Equipment Building Standard, which was set by Bell Communications Research – the jointly-owned research laboratory of the Baby Bells. The Texas machine will use the Micro Disk Fault-Tolerant RAID-1 subsystem from ECCS Inc, Tinton Falls, New Jersey. The disk array is claimed to be the first hot-swappable RAID device to package two 3.5 disks – in capacities of 500Mb to 2Gb into a 5.25 subsystem. The Sparcstations run SunOS 4.1X and Solaris 2.X; no indication of prices were given.Texas Instruments Inc was also due to reveal a hot new signal processor chip, the 64-bit MVP, after we closed for press; SuperMac Technology Inc says it is to use the MVP in an accelerator for CD-ROM developers using its SuperMac Cinepak video compression technology.
