HOUSTON -- Compaq this week will put the finishing touches on the Unix strategy it crafted as a result of its acquisition of Digital last year. The company will also make several announcements for the high availability enterprise Unix market.
The company will announce that it will distribute or support three Unix operating systems:
- Tru64 Unix, aimed at large enterprise business intelligence and technical computing markets.
- Linux, targeted at ISPs, technical computing and the education market, and as a front-end or application server to Tru64 Unix.
- And Project Monterey, a 64-bit version of Unix being developed by IBM, SCO and Sequent. Compaq will use SCO UnixWare for small and mid-size enterprises. Over time, Compaq will migrate to Project Monterey.
Most significant in this announcement is Compaq's support for 64-bit Project Monterey, the Unix Intel claims will be the premiere version for Intel machines. Initially Compaq and Sequent were working on a form of Digital Unix for 64-bit Intel chips. However when Compaq acquired Digital, Sequent defected to the IBM, SCO and Sequent camp, and Compaq was left speechless about its further plans.
"Do you blame them?" says one analyst of Compaq's silence, at that time, on supporting Project Monterey.
The company also upgraded its TruCluster Server, which runs on Tru64 Unix, with a "uniform shared root" technology that allows faster installation and management across the cluster. It treats each processor in the cluster the same by allowing system managers to perform operations only once and having them take affect across the cluster.
If one system in the cluster goes down, another will automatically failover for it. Load-balancing, which increases availability and performance if one processor is overloaded, is also automatic in TruCluster Server V5.0.
This capability allows Compaq to have clusterly capability for nearly OpenVMS clustering capability, according to Terry C. Shannon, an independent analyst in Ashland, Mass. "With the new clustering release, Compaq will have the best Unix clustering in the business, better than what SCO is going to offer for some time to come."
Tru64 Unix has also been enhanced with the addition of system and application partitioning. In system partitioning, multiple instances of the same or different operating system can run on the same machine. For instance, Windows NT could run as an application server or front-end process, while the back-end of the machine would run Tru64 Unix, allowing customers to consolidate application servers into more multipurpose servers.
In addition, Tru64 Unix allows multiple applications to run in different partitions under the control of a single copy of the operating system. System management has been enhanced to include dynamic tuning and a Web-based Java interface.
The company will also port several of its Tru64 compilers to Linux this year, which will offer an estimated 2x the performance increase over GNU-based processors, according to Compaq's claims.
Tandem tied in
Beyond, Tru64 Unix V5.0, Compaq will merge its Tandem machines into the company's high-end server line, allowing them to use Tandem Unix, Windows NT and Tru64 Unix. The company, last week introduced Compaq NonStop Software for Windows NT Server, a cluster-centric software infrastructure for Windows NT Server with transaction and business intelligence.
The package, which consists of the Compaq NonStop SQL/MX database and BEA's TUXEDO transaction processing package for Windows NT Server, runs on Compaq ProLiant 5500 servers.
Mid- and low-end server additions
The company will also introduce a mid-range AlphaServer with four RISC processors. It is powered by the 500MHz EV6 chipset and allows 64-bit performance at a price that is half that of the AlphaServer 4100. It supports Tru64 Unix, OpenVMS, Windows NT or Linux.
The AlphaServer ES40 uses a crossbar switch technology that allows data to transfer between memory and the processors at 5.2 G-bytes/sec. On the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp.'s SPECint95 test, the ES40 performs more than 59 percent faster than the Sun E450 and HP K580, according to test results posted on www.spec.org.
The Compaq AlphaServer ES40, which scales to over 1 terabyte of internal storage and has up to 10 64-bit PCI bus slots, features system management capabilities; hot-swap drives, power supplies and fans and a tower, pedestal or rack configuration. In May, Compaq will add a new low-end to its AlphaServer line, the DS10.
The AlphaServer ES40 will be available in May starting at under $23,900 with a 500MHz Alpha 21264, 512 M-bytes RAM, a 4 G-byte disk and 4 M-bytes of cache memory. TruCluster Server V.5.0 and Tru64 Unix 5.0 will be available mid-year starting at $5,000 and $2,500, respectively.
In a related announcement, Compaq will roll out two new ProSignia NeoServer servers for small and mid-size businesses. Based on the 366MHz Celeron processor, the servers will be bundled with cabling, a 10/100 Ethernet hub, a 10/100 network adapter and a version of SCO OpenServer that supports up to 25 users.
