Bull Beefs Up NovaScale Itanium Servers.French server maker Groupe Bull Groupe Bull (also known as Bull Computer or simply Bull) is a French computer company based in Les Clayes-sous-Bois, outside Paris. The company has also been known at various times as Bull General Electric, Honeywell Bull, CII Honeywell Bull SA has announced that it has fleshed out its Itanium-based NovaScale server line, which offers support for Linux and Windows operating systems Operating systems can be categorized by technology, ownership, licensing, working state, usage, and by many other characteristics. In practice, many of these groupings may overlap. as well as Bull's own GCOS (General Comprehensive OS) An operating system from Bull that, originally used in its minis and mainframes, has migrated to its Intel-based servers. GCOS was originally developed by GE in the early 1970s as GECOS (GE Comprehensive OS), then changed to General 8 proprietary environment. The NovaScale machines were announced in March 2003 amidst a long line of restructurings and government bailouts as the French company tries to adjust to the harsh realities Harsh Reality are a little-known, proto-prog band born in Stevenage, Hertfordshire out of the remnants of the Freightliner Blues Band (formerly the Revolution) in the early sixties. of today's server market. Back in March 2003, Bull announced the NovaScale 4040, 5080, and 5160 servers, which support 4, 8, and 16 of Intel Corp's Itanium 2 processors. These initial machines ranged in price from 25,000 to 95,000 euros in base configurations, and ran SuSE (now part of Novell) Linux 8 and Microsoft Corp's Windows Advanced Server Limited Edition for the Itaniums. The four-way cell boards in the NovaScale machines were based on Intel's own E8870 chipsets, and Bull's own Flexible Architecture for Multiple Environments (FAME) and its FAME Scalability Switch to glue the four-way boards into a single system image using NUMA-like clustering. In September 2003, Bull delivered its GCOS 8 proprietary environment on a special version of the NovaScale called the 9080. This machine is an eight-way that allows up to four of the processors and 4GB of main memory in the box to be used to support GCOS 8; the remaining processing capacity can run Linux or Windows. These machines became available in November 2003, and pricing started at 110,000 euros. In the latest round of NovaScale announcements, Bull is introducing two new 9000 Series machines, one that spans 16 processors (the 9160) and another that spans 32 processors (the 9320). These machines can be carved up into virtual eight-way machines using hardware partitioning developed by Bull, and then within those eight-way partitions, one or two of them can be dedicated to running GCOS 8. (For you history buffs The name Buffs can mean:
Software that controls the operation of a computer, directs the input and output of data, keeps track of files, and controls the processing of computer programs. from the late 1960s, with Unix being the other fork; it was created by the mainframe unit of General Electric.) The remaining processors can be used to support Linux or Windows. Bull says that it will be working to give GCOS customers more performance and better bang for the buck in the future, which might mean the "Madison" 9MB chip due later this year and the dual-core "Montecito" Itaniums due next year. Or, it might mean that Bull is actually going to extend the SMP (Symmetric MultiProcessing) A multiprocessing architecture in which multiple CPUs, residing in one cabinet, share the same memory. SMP systems provide scalability. As business increases, additional CPUs can be added to absorb the increased transaction volume. scalability of GCOS as well, which seems like something that customers would probably appreciate. Bull says that the entry NovaScale 9160 with a single GCOS processor activated sells for 100,000 euros. In addition to enhancing the GCOS-capable machines, Bull also launched a new line of NovaScale machines, the 6000 Series. The 6080, 6160, and 6320 machines support 8, 16, and 32 Itanium 2 processors, respectively. The machines can support up to 256GB of main memory and up to 3.1TB of internal disk storage. The NovaScale 5000s can be upgraded to the 6000 Series, which is bound to make customers who just ponied up money for one of these machines within the past year happy. A NovaScale 6080 with four Itanium processors, 4GB of main memory, and six 36GB disks costs 100,000 euros. Windows Server See Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2003, Windows Home Server, Windows 2000 and Windows NT. 2003 Enterprise Edition and Datacenter Edition are supported on these boxes, as are the Itanium versions of Linux distributions  The external links in this article or section may require cleanup to comply with Wikipedia's content policies. from Red Hat Inc and Novell Inc.
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