Digital prepping NT-only Alpha server line

Maynard, Mass.

Digital Equipment Corp. has big plans for its Alpha-based servers this year.

Next week, Digital plans to announce a new line of Windows NT servers, reportedly called DigitalServers, with three new Alpha/NT boxes. There also will be four new Pentium-based NT servers included in the line. The Pentium-based servers, beginning with the DigitalServer 1000, reportedly will handle from one to eight chips; the new Alpha boxes scale from one to four. It also appears that Digital is looking to make the Alpha-based products in its DigitalServer line more attractive to buyers of today's commodity-style Intel-based boxes. The main weapon here is price. Sources close to the company claimed that the new Alpha-based DigitalServers will be much less expensive than Digital's current AlphaServer line.

"Digital is getting very aggressive with Windows NT on Alpha," said Terry Shannon, an Ashland, Mass.-based analyst and author of the Shannon Knows DEC" newsletter.

The DigitalServers will range from basic workgroup boxes to high-end enterprise machines.

The base price of an entry Alpha-based DigitalServer, the 3300, will probably be about $4,000; the midrange box, the 5300, will cost about $7,000. The Pentium boxes will be a little less expensive than the Alpha machines, sources said.

Shannon also said Digital "will swallow its pride" and issue Alpha-based chips that will be "lobotomized" and unable to work with Digital Unix and OpenVMS servers. The NT-only chips will reportedly be less expensive that way. Digital will continue with its AlphaServer line, which runs OpenVMS and Digital Unix.

New AlphaServer offerings will fall into four categories, Shannon said. There will be one- to two-processor workgroup servers; one- to four-processor midrange boxes; high-end midrange servers with up to eight chips; and enterprise servers handling between eight and 32 chips. Wildfire to spread

The technological peak of the year for Alpha-based servers will be the introduction of "Wildfire," a box that now is in prototype form and should ship before year-end, Shannon said. Wildfire will offer up to 32 processors and 128G bytes of RAM. Wildfire will be built around motherboards containing eight CPUs each; the boards will attach via peer-to-peer crossbar switches, Shannon said. This architecture ultimately will allow Wildfire to hold as many as 100 chips. Clustering with Microsoft

Later this month, Digital also will be announcing its new NT clustering strategy. Working closely with Microsoft Corp., Digital will integrate high-end OpenVMS clustering technology with Microsoft Cluster Server, said Phil Cahan, marketing manager for Digital's NT clustering and Windows NT products.

Right now, Microsoft's Cluster Server software enables users only to do simple functions, such as enabling the link-up of two servers for failover operations. Cahan said that with Digital's OpenVMS technology, NT will be able to exploit clustering potential much more efficiently, although much of the technology will have to wait until Microsoft's NT Enterprise Server 5.0 comes out late this year or sometime in 1999. Sources said Digital will soon announce that it will be rolling out preconfigured server systems ready for clustering.

Among the functions to be added will be job scheduling, a mainframe-style application that allows users to distribute applications over multiple servers.

There also will be enterprise-level data sharing and storage applications added, to in-crease reliability and availability of servers. Sources said disaster tolerance capacity would be announced for NT later this year.