Data General's new AViiON servers set standard for enterprise computing performance; First company to ship Intel-Based Pentium Pro SHV enterprise servers.WESTBORO, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 15, 1996--Demonstrating its leadership in the enterprise server market, Data General Corp. today announced that it has begun volume shipments of two new servers based on the Intel Pentium Pro Standard High Volume (SHV SHV Shareholder Value SHV Standard High Volume SHV Sheave SHV Steenkolen Handels Vereeniging SHV Shreveport, LA, USA - Regional Airport (Airport Code) SHV Sport Horse Versatility SHV Supersonic/Hypersonic Vehicle SHV Super Hybrid Vehicle ) motherboard. Data General's AViiON AV 4900 and AV 5900 servers give customers exceptional reliability and availability to support their business-critical computing needs. "With their performance, scalability and high availability features, our new AViiON systems are the first true enterprise-level servers to use Intel's SHV boards," said David Ellenberger, vice president of Corporate Marketing, Data General. "The Pentium Pro processor-based AViiON servers more than match the performance level of systems based on proprietary RISC RISC in full Reduced Instruction Set Computing Computer architecture that uses a limited number of instructions. RISC became popular in microprocessors in the 1980s. chips -- giving customers a high-performance, industry-standard solution, along with the cost benefits of high volume commodity Intel economics." AViiON enterprise servers Data General's AV 4900 office and AV 5900 rackmounted enterprise servers are based on the Intel motherboards, which have up to four 166 MHz or 200 MHz Pentium Pro processors, 512KB cache, and a maximum of 4GB of memory. The systems can access up to 5 terabytes of fault-tolerant CLARiiON storage. Three operating systems, the company's DG/UX, SCO UnixWare System or Microsoft Windows NT Server, supporting more than 15,000 commercial applications, are available with the new AViiON servers. At the system level, high availability for business-critical applications is provided with fully redundant power and cooling; automated recovery from CPU CPU in full central processing unit Principal component of a digital computer, composed of a control unit, an instruction-decoding unit, and an arithmetic-logic unit. , memory and disk channel failures; and multi-path I/O (Input/Output) The transfer of data between the CPU and a peripheral device. Every transfer is an output from one device and an input to another. See PC input/output. I/O - Input/Output . The servers also include Data General's proprietary AV/Alert and NT/Alert automated problem detection software which supports diagnostics, machine-initiated call-out to worldwide country service centers, and remote assistance. Recent benchmarking tests have demonstrated the robust, powerful performance of the AViiON Pentium Pro servers. An AV 5900 outfitted with four 166 MHz Pentium Pro processors recently outperformed RISC based systems from IBM (International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY, www.ibm.com) The world's largest computer company. IBM's product lines include the S/390 mainframes (zSeries), AS/400 midrange business systems (iSeries), RS/6000 workstations and servers (pSeries), Intel-based servers (xSeries) , Hewlett-Packard, Digital Equipment and Siemens Nixdorf in the SPECint_rate_base95 benchmark. Last week, an AV 4900 running Sybase SQL Server Sybase SQL Server - Adaptive Server Enterprise 11 produced the best Transaction Processing Council Benchmark C (TPC-C A benchmark that measures overall transaction processing performance. See TPC. ) performance per CPU to date. And, the AV 4900 was chosen as an "Analyst's Choice" by PC Week last month, following tests conducted by PC Week Labs comparing six Pentium Pro processor based systems. David House, senior vice president, general manager of Intel's Enterprise Server Group, said, "Data General's benchmark results clearly show that the Pentium Pro processor is competitive with any proprietary RISC processor in terms of delivering performance for enterprise-class workloads. These new servers demonstrate the advantages of using low-cost, high-performance SHV baseboards to construct highly scalable systems that can handle the largest enterprise applications. The combination of Data General's experience with large-scale, mission-critical system deployments and the power of this platform, provides customers with an excellent solution for a broad range of computing needs." Complete enterprise solutions The AV 4900 and AV 5900 servers can be combined with Data General's fault-tolerant CLARiiON disk arrays to provide continuous data access and the highest level of data integrity. CLARiiON systems deliver the industry's leading high availability RAID storage solutions for open enterprise environments. In addition, the new AViiON servers can also be clustered to provide both scalable performance and high availability. Up to eight AViiON systems can share resources, such as applications and storage, while presenting a single-system view to users and systems administrators. "This announcement represents another step forward in Data General's roadmap to the introduction of powerful high-end AViiON systems based on NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) A multiprocessing architecture in which memory is separated into close and distant banks. NUMA is similar to SMP, in which multiple CPUs share a single memory. However, in SMP, all CPUs access a common memory at the same speed. (Non-Uniform Memory Access (architecture) Non-Uniform Memory Access - (NUMA) A memory architecture, used in multiprocessors, where the access time depends on the memory location. A processor can access its own local memory faster than non-local memory (memory which is local to another processor or shared ) architecture," continued Data General's Ellenberger. "These systems, to be introduced late this year, will extend 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. capabilities using the company's NUMALiiNE technology, including high speed, industry- standard Scalable Coherent Interface (hardware, protocol) Scalable Coherent Interface - (SCI) The ANSI/IEEE 1596-1992 standard that defines a point-to-point interface and a set of packet protocols. The SCI protocols use packets with a 16-byte header and 16, 64, or 256 data bytes. (SCI (Scalable Coherent Interface) An IEEE standard for a high-speed bus that uses wire or fiber-optic cable. It can transfer data up to 1GBytes/sec. (hardware) SCI - 1. Scalable Coherent Interface. 2. UART. ) interconnect, and sophisticated operating system techniques to create a shared memory system See shared memory. . As a result, the thousands of SMP applications available today can run on NUMA systems without modification." Last month, the company established a NUMALiiNE Business Unit to develop OEM relationships and a worldwide distribution network for its NUMA technology and systems. Several leading companies, including ICL in the United Kingdom, Dansk Data Elektronik in Denmark and Daewoo Telecom in Korea, have announced plans to integrate NUMALiiNE technology into their high-end servers. Pricing and availability Available immediately, pricing for the 166 MHz Pentium Pro based AV 4900 and AV 5900 servers starts at $34,995. Pricing for the 200 MHz AV 4900 and AV 5900 servers, which will be available within 60 days, starts at $39,995. About Data General Data General (NYSE NYSE See: New York Stock Exchange : DGN), based in Westboro, Mass., specializes in servers, storage systems, and related software and services for customers worldwide. The company reported revenues of $1.2 billion during fiscal 1995. Additional information on the company, its products, and services is available on the internet at http://www.dg.com. -0- AViiON and CLARiiON are registered trademarks, DG/UX and NUMALiiNE are trademarks of Data General Corp. All brand and product names appearing in the press release may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. CONTACT: Jim Dunlap or George Goldman Data General Corp. Edelman Worldwide 508/898-6546 212/704-4440 jim_dunlap@dg.com ggoldman@edelman.com |
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