November

News & announcements

January

December 1997

Week ending 19 December, 1997

Dense-Pac Microsystems Product To Be Used In Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) Workstations
Dense-Pac tests their 256 MByte SDRAM on Digital motherboards; allows up to 1 GByte on a PC164LX.
Dense-Pac Microsystems, Inc. Receives $1.5 Million Order From DeskStation Technology To Supply Newly Released 256 Mbyte Synchronous DRAM Memory Devices
And DeskStation Technology places an order for it for their RPX164-2 based systems which will support up to 1.5 GBytes of SDRAM.
Digital leads multivendor Exchange effort
Digital teams with 7 vendors of Exchange add-ons to provide more functionality for messaging and collaborative computing.
NT 5.0, Your Next Server
Some details on the distinction between the x86-specific 3 GByte hack versus the 64 bit VLM capabilities in NT 5.0
PV-WAVE Announces Version 6.2 for Microsoft Windows
More features to make it more familiar to Windows-users.
SunGard Financial Applications Now Available on DIGITAL AlphaServer
SunGard Capital Markets' Panorama and The Devon System provide complete enterprise-wide risk management, trading, and tracking solutions based on standard NT, COM, and SQL components versus proprietary solutions.
Vendors Embracing Merced May Chew Off Their Own Chips
With Sun now committing to port Solaris to IA-64, one analyst projects that this forecasts the end-of-life for SPARC and PA-RISC. The analyst does not offer any insight into why he feels that a manufacturer's choice to support a low-end processor signals the end of their support of a high-end processor.
Workgroup Products That Work
Peter Coffee at PC Week groups Alpha's FX!32 into the batch of products that he gives a thumbs up to as giving users choice, going so far as to say as the Alpha may be the only remaining competition to Intel that will lead into the next decade. My favorite quote: "FX32 (sic) gives buyers the freedom to select the world's fastest processor architecture rather than settling for the most popular".

Week ending 12 December, 1997

Windows NT Wizards Symposium
Digital's in-depth meeting of NT Wizards is coming up.
PC makers plotting Mac expo offensive
Two vendors invade the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco next month with Windows NT offerings. Intergraph and Digital line up to offer Mac users an alternative.
533au2 for Windows NT and DIGITAL UNIX
Digital announces their dual-processor workstation, joining Aspen's box. Two 533 MHz processors should give dual P-II's a run for their money and allow for some fair benchmarks where single processor Alphas will no longer have to compete against SMP configs.
DIGITAL Announces Enterprise-Wide Medical Viewing Solution at Annual RSNA Meeting
Digital announces availability of the first set of products for shared viewing of medical imagery and annotations, in conjunction with ImageLabs and Dartnell Enterprises.
Digital previews Tunnel '98, VPN security upgrade
A new version of the Alta Vista tools will be available in January.
DIGITAL Ready To Go Cluster Solutions for Windows NT
Pre-built clusters available for complete off-the-shelf solutions.
DIGITAL Servers Deliver Scalable, Cost-Effective Performance for Microsoft BackOffice, IIS
Digital announces support for BackOffice Server and IIS v4.0 on Alpha platforms ranging from the single processor workgroup servers through the 14 processor 8400.
DIGITAL Takes Media Content Creation Market by Storm
The official announcement for all the rumours we've been hearing about the past couple weeks.
InterScan VirusWall and ScanMail for Microsoft Exchange Now Support Digital Alpha Server Systems Running Windows NT
Alpha support for virus scanning in SMTP email attachments, HTTP files, and FTP traffic, plus automatic Exchange monitoring in two products from Trend Micro.
Metainfo Releases Upgraded NNTP News Server for Windows NT
New version of the NNTP server includes a new "Lite" version for small workgroups or select ranges of newsgroups.
Packet Engine's G-NIC Gigabit Ethernet PCI Network Interface Cards Provide Industry's Highest Performance
New Gigabit Ethernet interface tops out over 400 MB/sec on Alpha's 64 bit PCI slots.
Parallelism triggers supercomputer rush
A look at supercomputer market and how different vendors are approaching it.
Red Hat caps off new Linux 5.0 OS
Okay, so it's not NT. But enough people running Alphas want to do both...
Rose UltraView
A review of a keyboard, mouse, and monitor switch with support listed for Alpha.
Agreement Between Secure Computing and Digital Equipment Corporation Expands Market Penetration of SmartFilter URL Filtering and Monitoring Software
SmartFilter to be included with Alpha NT systems starting in the first quarter of CY '98.
IBM Intellistation NT-Based Workstation Posts Fastest BAPCo Benchmark Scores
A dual processor, 300 MHz Pentium II beats a single processor 600 MHz Alpha running office applications -- by a whopping 10%. Leave off the 16-bit PowerPoint benchmark and the 2 systems are nearly equally matched. Check out the latest SYSmark results from BAPCo. Now, where are the results from that dual-processor Alpha???

Week ending 5 December, 1997

BYTE Best of Show-Las Vegas Fall 1997
Tri-Star's StarStation Star SXE Workstation nails best desktop system of Comdex, besting other nominees IBM and Gateway. Look for the entry "Best Desktop Workstation" in the list of winners.
Digital Ogles Mac Market
Digital's Intel, Alpha boxes to target content creators
Digital has new workstation on tap
As Alpha continues to press into new markets, Digital now targets the installed base of Macintosh users. This new configuration of the 500 MHz Personal Workstation, the Creation Studio, includes Corel Draw v8 (Alpha only, Intel users get v7), MetaCreation's Painter, and Dragon Systems' NaturallySpeaking, 64 MBytes of RAM, a 17" monitor, 24x CD-ROM, a 4 GByte disk, and a IOmega ZIP drive (sorry, Kirk!)
DIGITAL High Availability Internet Security Solutions
Looking for the ultimate in availability for your Internet firewall and tunnel? Never let your guard down: check out the preconfigured clustered AlphaServer 800's running NT and Alta Vista software.
DIGITAL Teams with Microsoft to Provide Highly Scalable Platforms for Microsoft SQL Server, Enterprise Edition 6
Touting the 8400 as being "the industry's only servers that will immediately take advantage of the performance, memory, and scalability advantages of 64-bit Windows NT 5.0 and Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 when these products become available", Digital announces that the Alpha platform is now ready to take advantage of the 3 GBytes of RAM, up to 8 processors, and the clustering that NTsEE supports.
NT-Only Alpha on Horizon
A new system with the ability to only use NT firmware will supposedly lower the cost to within 15% of comparably configured, albeit CPU-deficient, x86 boxes. This should help Alpha to further penetrate the low-end desktop market.
Short Take- Buy one- get suite free
Buy an Alpha for serving up Lotus Domino and get a package of 20 groupware apps worth $695 for free.
The Ferrari of File Transfers
A dedicated Alpha system that can act as a file server to both NT and UNIX clients, this single processor box bests a quad processor Compaq Prolinea by over 60% in PC Week's throughput benchmarks. Whoa, did I say "single processor Alpha" beat "quad processor Compaq" in "PC Week's benchmark"? Cool...
Upstart Challenging Digital With NT Cluster
DeskStation packages its own dual server cluster using a pair of RPX164-2 motherboards with 533 MHz processors, and Qualix's Octopus HA+ clustering software.
Enorex to OEM Box Hill's Raid Solution With Their AlphaPowered(TM) Server
Enorex looks to Box Hill to help build the "EnoRAID 1000" using an Enorex 533 MHz NT server and Box Hill's RAID Box 5300 Turbo+.
Strange Bedfellows
Systematic Systems Integration replaces Netware systems with Alphas running NT to provide high performance, quality, available warehousing and interconnects to AS/400 systems.
Digital Semiconductor, Alpha-Based Personal Workstations On The Way
Old news regarding the 14 vendors who announced 21164PC based workstations at Comdex, but this article includes some insight into positioning and market strategy.
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The Alpha NT Source

Last revised Saturday, 29 April 2000

AlphaMan

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