| November | News & announcements |
January |
Articles
gathered by A. Stauber, the Alpha News Hound
and Aaron Sakovich, the Alphaman;
edited by Aaron Sakovich.
Week ending 20 December, 1998
Network Appliance suggests you off-load the file services to one of its NetApp F700 series units, dedicated file servers--or filers. A filer looks just like any other Windows NT server on your network, has all the high-reliability and availability you could ask for, is easily administered, and performs impressively to boot.»
ENSA (Enterprise Network Storage Architecture) is a road map of interoperable products and technologies, which the company will implement over two years. The goal is to offer heterogeneous storage devices in a flexible, easy-to-manage manner.»
But Compaq is doing the right thing by pushing high-end servers based on the Alpha processor, Williamson said.»
Terry Conner, president of Tributary Systems Inc., a St. Louis-based reseller, had questions at the time. "We were very excited. But we were afraid Tandem would be swallowed up by Compaq," he said...
On the technology and product side, Conner said he has been pleased by Tandem's adoption of Digital's Alpha microprocessor technology in its own line and offerings, in addition to leveraging Compaq's brand equity.»
Clearly, 1998 was a continuation of the now-familiar trend in which data piled up at unprecedented rates in companies, thanks in large part to Internet services and applications. In fact, disk storage requirements more than doubled in the past 12 months at large companies, according to Forrester Research Inc...
The Alpha architecture got new life in 1998. Nobody's ever doubted the technical merits of Alpha's high-perfor- mance, reliable, 64-bit architecture. But Compaq's purchase of Digital made Alpha respectable.»
The software maker last week released versions of two of its development tools, Visual Basic 6.0 Enterprise Edition and Visual C++ 6.0 Professional Edition, that are designed to run on Compaq's 64-bit, RISC-based Alpha processors and Windows NT.»
Week ending 13 December, 1998
The Seoul, South Korea, company, which has been manufacturing second-generation Alpha chips since last year, announced the plans to build third-generation Alpha processors two weeks ago.»
One top HP reseller, Manchester Equipment Co., is assembling what could be a path-breaking Unix-NT interoperability demonstration for a Wall Street show in late February. Unfortunately for HP, the NT side of Manchester's booth will feature Compaq/Intel and Alpha servers rather than HP NetServers.
"Right now, the Compaq-HP alliance is tactical for this show, but if it springs forward we'll be taking it into the marketplace," says Manchester VP Dick Wurst.»
ENSA (Enterprise Network Storage Architecture), which the company will implement over two years, aims to provide access to pools of heterogeneous storage devices that are flexible and easy to manage.
ENSA focuses on storage scalability, support for several operating systems, "virtualizing" storage and policy-driven management software.
In 1999 and 2000, Compaq will roll storage systems that support Windows NT on both Intel and Alpha platforms but that will be able to access data residing in systems running under SCO Unix, Digital Unix, Solaris, Irix and AIX, said officials at Compaq, in Houston.»
Every year industry experts declare the Unix platform dead, with Wintel claiming victory. But yet again outside forces have reincarnated the midrange market.»
VARs that attended an ESP advisory meeting in Houston this month said they were relieved and had been concerned Compaq might impose terms and conditions similar to those of the low-margin PC business. Most of them were former Digital Equipment Corp. VARs.»
Compaq last week said that it is now buying more than half of its chips from Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., thus stabilizing the previously precarious position where its competitor Intel supplied most of its Alpha chips.»
Ditzel's pronouncements are closely followed because Transmeta (Santa Clara, Calif.) is widely assumed to be designing a VLIW processor. Such speculation has been fueled by a patent recently issued to the company that proposes a technique for speeding up RISC operations by decomposing instructions into VLIW-like parallel streams (see Nov. 16, page 8)...
Indeed, he sees good opportunities for the Sparc and Alpha architectures, particularly if Intel's upcoming Merced CPU takes time to gain widespread support.»
Oracle introduced more than just a new database release-it spelled out what it believes is a new computing architecture. Meanwhile, Microsoft's SQL Server 7.0 represents an important step in the company's push for the enterprise, VARs said...
Eckhard Pfeiffer, chief executive of Compaq, reaffirmed the Houston-based company's commitment to Alpha. Oracle and Digital Equipment Corp. had been tight partners since the mid-1980s, when VMS was far and away the leading platform for Oracle databases. Pfeiffer said Compaq, which bought Digital earlier this year, would not abandon Digital platforms. "Oracle is central to our enterprise commitments. We are going to continue to invest in the Alpha microprocessor," said Pfeiffer.
"We expect Alpha to be the highest-performing platform for the next decade," added John Nicholson, vice president of business intelligence and database technology at Compaq.»
Samsung said it has set a target of $100 million in sales next year for the Alpha product.»
Houston-based Compaq Computer Corp. has said it is forging ahead with its Alpha processor road map and plans to release its next-generation Alpha processor in 2000. Some analysts have described the Alpha 21364, which will target clock speeds of more than 1GHz when it is launched, as a potentially tough competitor for Merced.»
Samsung Network Systems Division last week announced that it will support Digital Unix in future enterprise system products.»
The Alpha chip is also distinguished by the fact that it can run the Microsoft Windows NT operating system natively--the only chip besides those based on Intel's x86 series that can.
Microsoft is using Alpha chips to develop the 64-bit version of the next version of Windows NT.»
Last revised Saturday, 29 April 2000 |
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