Articles
gathered by A. Stauber, the Alpha News Hound
and Aaron Sakovich, the Alphaman;
edited by Aaron Sakovich.
November 1998
Week ending 29
November, 1998
- The Catalyst for Change
- «Three years
ago, dow chemical co. underwent a radical metamorphosis,
reorganizing business units and shutting down or selling
nonstrategic businesses and underperforming assets. A
linchpin in this global overhaul was a new corporate data
warehouse.
"What began as an
organizational change quickly became an opportunity to
rethink the way we were providing business
information," explains Mike Costa, client manager of
IT at Dow, in Midland, Mich...
The VBIS data warehouse is built from transactional
data from Dow's enterprise SAP AG R/2 installation, says
Ron Johnson, IS program manager for finance. The R/2
system captures and cleanses the data and feeds it to an
Oracle Corp. database housed on two Digital Equipment
Corp. Alpha 8400 servers running OpenVMS. One terabyte of
data, consisting of 30 million records, is added to the
warehouse every three months.
From there, Johnson says, Cognos Corp.'s PowerPlay
software running on 10 Windows NT application servers
transforms the data into OLAP cubes. The cubes are then
stored on another 20 Windows NT file servers. Users
running PowerPlay on Windows 95 desktop PCs access those
file servers for reports.»
-
- NewTek
Showcases the Best of '98 and Awards Grant Boucher
Achievement Award At the LightWave 3D Theater
- Congratulations to Grant
Boucher and Station X Studios, committed to Alpha NT!
- «NewTek, manufacturer of industry-leading 3D animation
and video production products, today announced that Grant
Boucher, Station X Studios CEO and founder, will be
awarded the LightWave 3D Achievement Award at the NewTek
Expo and Digital Content Creation (DCC) Expo, December
2-4, 1998 at the LA Convention Center
"Grant
Boucher is one of the most dynamic artists in the
entertainment industry," said Tim Jenison, CEO and
founder of NewTek. "We are pleased to recognize his
many impressive accomplishments, and honor him with this
prestigious achievement award."»
Week ending 8
November, 1998
- Inside
Track
- FUD Alert! conspiracy theories
from Intel regarding new bus technologies and their first
major Merced program loss.
- «Junket Report. When Craig
Barrett went to London recently, he managed to reveal a
number of interesting opinions and observations that were
not picked up by the American media. He believes, for
example, that the PCI-X bus consortium is a conspiracy by
Compaq and others to untrack Dell, which was purposefully
left out of the group...
-
- ...elsewhere he said he wasn't concerned about Compaq's
using the Alpha chip rather than the Merced for its
Tandem machines.»
-
- Compaq's
Comdex Thunderstorm
- «After years away, Compaq Computer Corp.'s President
Eckhard Pfeiffer heralded Compaq's return to Comdex with
the bang of new PC technology thunder.
-
- Alpha, Digital Unix and OpenVMS resellers will also be
pleased with Pfeiffer's strong support for both the
architecture and the operating systems. At the same time,
improved operating system interoperability with Windows
2000 (AKA NT) promises to make interoperability solution
providers jobs easier.»
-
- Compaq
looking good
- «Although our stock in trade is the news of the week,
some stories deserve the perspective that comes from a
few months of aging. With its mid-October earnings
announcement, Compaq invites a look at the progress of
its midyear acquisition of Digital Equipment Corp...
-
- Delays in the next generation of NT and in Intel's IA-64,
or Merced, have strengthened corporate IT managers'
appreciation of Compaq's 64-bit platform of Unix on
Alpha.
-
- Enterprise IT managers, take note.»
-
- Intel
and HP: Strange bedfellows
- Will a 1 GHz 21264 or 21364 be
an IA-64 killer?
- «Different agendas strain 64-bit chip development plans;
Merced won't be expected 'RISC killer'.
-
- Two years ago, engineers at Hewlett-Packard Co.'s
development labs came to a painful conclusion: The 64-bit
Merced chip HP was developing with Intel Corp. would not
be powerful enough to surpass HP's existing PA-RISC
architecture...
-
- When Merced debuts in mid-2000, it will have a clock
speed of about 800MHz. By comparison, the 21264 Alpha
from Compaq Computer Corp. is expected to reach 1GHz by
that time.
Merced's other technical advantages, which
are largely dependent on somewhat obscure
instruction-level parallelism in software, are not
expected to outweigh Alpha's clock speed advantage,
according to Linley Gwennap, vice president of
MicroDesign Resources Inc., in Sunnyvale, Calif.»
-
- Vegas
vacation: It's that time again
- «Viva, as in Las Vegas, baby. The Katt was crooning as
he finished packing up for his annual Comdex/Fall Desert
Crawl.
-
- Catamaran is the nom de code for the first NT-only Alpha
box being developed by Compaq. Until the new box ships
next June, the Pfeifferettes will continue to sell
Digital-designed Alpha systems under a Compaq label.»
-
- IBM
Gets the Gold -- The RS/6000 ekes out a win among
midrange contenders
- Alpha moves way ahead this
year, making a big impact with VARs.
- «Compaq was the clear victor in terms of sales and
product improvement. Thirty-seven percent of VARs
surveyed say Alpha was the best-selling product... A good
majority of respondents, 35 percent, say Compaq's Alpha
was the most improved product in the survey.»
-
- Awaiting
A Verdict: Jury Still Out On Enterprise Potential --
Linux To Find Home In Small, Midsize Market
- «Support for Linux is growing, but it is not going to
displace "substantial mission-critical Unix" or
Windows NT, said John Rose, group general manager of
Compaq Computer Corp.'s Enterprise Computing Group.
Rose,
who said Compaq's Alpha systems are a large-volume Linux
platform, said the operating system is more likely to be
found in small-business niches. "You're not going to
see Linux being used to run secure credit-card or
stock-market transactions," he said.»
-
- Pfeiffer
reiterates Compaq's commitment to the customer
- «Compaq CEO Eckhard Pfeiffer addressed the throngs of
attendees at Comdex in Las Vegas Monday, reminding
listeners of Compaq's commitment to the customer and
flatly stating that Compaq is going direct.
-
- Pfeiffer was expected to reinforce Compaq's stance behind
the 64-bit Alpha processor technology it acquired when it
merged with Digital and showed several clips of high-end
animated graphics to demonstrate the chip's power.»
Week ending 15
November, 1998
- Rambus
batters down bus-speed roadblocks
- «A
groundswell of activity will surround Rambus Inc.'s
high-speed RDRAM at next week's Comdex.
While the technology has been in development for
several years, Rambus and partners such as Kingston
Technology Co. will report at the Las Vegas show that
Rambus dynamic RAM memory modules will be in volume
production in the first half of next year.»
-
- » An
Alternative To Options Exchanges
- » Investors team up on electronic exchange
- «The International Securities
Exchange would challenge traditional floor-based trading,
such as the Chicago Board of Exchange. It will deal in
options -- the rights to buy or sell shares of stock --
for 600 companies...
-
- The exchange will use Alpha-chip technology from Compaq
Computer Corp. (NYSE:CPQ),
officials said.»
-
- Ganymede
Software's Pegasus 1.1
- «What is the best way to determine the true response
time of your network from a user's perspective?
There
are several products that can flood your network cable to
help you discover the bottlenecks, but that doesn't
really tell the true story. A user is more concerned with
network response time than with network throughput.
Ganymede Software Inc.'s Pegasus version 1.1 can provide
you with a wealth of information about the health of your
LAN or WAN by simulating real-world application
traffic.»
-
- Network
App Caches In On Intranets
- «Network Appliance Inc. is targeting smaller ISPs and
the emerging enterprise market with a series of caching
appliances that promise higher performance and lower
costs.
The NetCache C700 series, which began shipping
this week, will be powered by a 600-MHz Alpha chip,
providing performance levels up to twice as much as
NetApp's current 600 series, according to Amit Pandey,
director of the NetCache product line.»
-
- Supercomputers
Grow Bigger For Business
- «Vendors are gearing up to add bigger tires and more
chrome to the monster trucks of the server world...
-
- For its part, Compaq is focusing on improving
connectivity for its AlphaServer symmetric
multiprocessing supercomputers, which now support
clusters of up to eight nodes. Compaq will demonstrate a
prototype cluster of 128 nodes in the first quarter of
1999, shipping systems on that scale later in the year.
The maximum processors supported per node also will
increase from 14 to 32 next year.»
-
- ISP
Goes Giga For Scalability, Performance
- «ISPs are giving Gigabit Ethernet the acid test in
advance of enterprise deployment.
The lesson for IT
managers: If Gigabit Ethernet can handle millions of
users and billions of packets on a service provider
network, it likely has the horsepower to fulfill
bandwidth requirements on corporate LANs.
MindSpring Enterprises Inc., one of the nation's
largest ISPs, this week will reveal that it is
standardizing on Gigabit Ethernet switches from Foundry
Networks, replacing older Cisco and Bay gear...
In Atlanta, the rollout is under way with one 8000
with 64 ports all running at 1,000 Mbps. The site houses
the company's production server LAN, which includes
nearly 90 Digital Alpha servers and Network Appliance
filers as its disk farm. Those servers support e-mail,
Web access and hosting, 200,000 newsgroups and FTP.»
- Alpha
motherboards target embedded computing apps
- «A pair of motherboards from Compaq Computer Corp. are
now in beta and will reach production in January,
addressing different slices of the embedded-computing
spectrum with various Alpha microprocessors and board
designs.
The AlphaPC 164RX, with a 525- or 600-MHz
Alpha 21164PC processor on board, targets applications in
medical imaging, data and voice communications, network
and Internet servers, and raster-image processing
engines. It will be priced at $799 each in 1,000-unit
quantities.
The AlphaPC 264DP, with one or two 500-MHz Alpha 21264
processors, aims at very high-end applications in CAT,
MRI, telecommunications switches and simulators. The
dual-processor version of this motherboard will be priced
at $7,999 in the same quantities.»
-
- Ardent
Software Launches DataStage Release 3
- «Ardent Software, Inc. (Nasdaq: ARDT) a global data
management company and leading provider of data mart and
warehouse development tools, today announced the
availability of DataStage® Release 3.5, an advanced data
extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) tool with
meta data exchange capabilities. New features include a
graphical transformation and advanced expression editor,
the ability to import ActiveX routines, improved meta
data usage analysis and the ability to exchange meta data
to help developers handle the time-consuming complexities
involved in building and maintaining enterprise data
warehouses...
-
- Supported
platforms include Microsoft Windows NT (Intel and DEC
Alpha NT) and all major UNIX implementations. For more
information about DataStage Release 3.5, call (508)
366-3888, or visit the Ardent Software web site at
www.ardentsoftware.com.»
-
- Visual
Numerics, Inc. and MicroEdge, Inc. Announce Powerful New
Product Integration
- «Visual Numerics, Inc., an industry-leading developer of
computational, visualization and Internet software
solutions, and MicroEdge, Inc., the provider of
award-wining multi-platform development tools, today
announced that they have formed a strategic relationship
between their companies. MicroEdge has integrated its
advanced and flexible cross-platform editing tool with
Visual Numerics' PV-WAVE.»
-
Week ending 8
November, 1998
- Alpha
sports new look
- «Compaq Computer Corp. is
living up to a commitment made in January to stand by
Digital's Alpha processor and AlphaServer line.
The
Houston-based computer company, which acquired Digital in
June and quickly began ramping up AlphaServer volumes
through the channel, recently renamed the AlphaServer
line, added a new logo and look, and rolled out the
long-awaited Alpha 21264, or EV6, processor. Compaq said
early this past summer it would drop the Digital name
from the product line.»
-
- NT
Warriors
- «As the two case studies presented here indicate,
experiences with NT 4.0 can vary. At Brigham Young
University, early hope that NT would offer a less
expensive way to open the school's back-end apps to the
Web is under review after a disappointing launch last
month. Conversely, site creation and hosting company
Judd's Online sees its front-to-back commitment to NT-and
Microsoft applications-yielding positive results...
-
- Brigham Young last month tried and failed to move to an
all-NT 4.0 server front end for its Web apps... "We
could put in dual-processor Pentiums running NT for
$7,000 versus tens of thousands of dollars for a Unix
box."... But it was not up to the task when only
Windows NT servers were tested.
-
- At site creation and hosting company Judd's Online, the
commitment to Windows NT runs wide and deep-and it's
getting the job done... Warren moved to NT's Internet
Information Server (IIS), which these days is connected
to Microsoft BackOffice apps, notably Microsoft's SQL
Server database. The company now has more than 20 NT
servers, running on Compaq and Digital Equipment Alpha
machines.»
-
- Jumbo
Frames takes step forward
- «In a quest to accelerate data delivery over enterprise
networks, a variety of hardware and software makers are
supporting Alteon Networks Inc.'s Jumbo Frames Ethernet
technology.»
-
- Sonic Foundry:
- ...Announces
ACID Rock
- ...Presents
ACID Music
- ...Introduces
ACID DJ
- Several packages for creating
music on your desktop.
-
- Compaq
showcases OEM products at Embedded Systems Conference
- «Two new Alpha OEM motherboards deliver greater
performance and a cost-effective alternative to x86 and
RISC platforms, for such embedded applications as medical
imaging, data and voice communications, and network and
Internet servers.
-
- The AlphaPC
164RX and AlphaPC
264DP, two new motherboards, provide world-class
performance for embedded applications. Targeted at
high-performance embedded applications, these boards
provide standard form-factor advantages, including
competitive pricing and access to the latest
technological advances, with the unmatched performance of
Alpha. The AlphaPC 164RX board is based on the latest
version of Compaq’s Alpha 21164PC processor, while
the AlphaPC 264DP board is based on the recently released
third-generation Alpha 21264.»
Compaq, Digital, Alpha, and Alphapowered
are trademarks of Compaq Computer Corporation.
Windows NT is a trademark of Microsoft.
The AlphaNT Source website and its
contents Copyright © 1998,1999,2000 by Aaron C. Sakovich
unless otherwise indicated.
This site is free documentation; you can
redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU
General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This document is distributed in the
hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty
of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License
for more details.
You should be able to access a copy of
the GNU General Public License on this website; if not, write to the Free
SoftwareFoundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.