Afterthought to the above.
I will repost from Rob Young, DEC thread guru. Hope he doesn't mind, but it's important to understand that DEC is not just Alpha and a sales team that doesn't know how to sell it:
To: Tom Michaud (2474 )
From: Rob YoungTuesday, Nov 18 1997 2:29AM EST
Reply # of 2905
Galaxies.
There are several Galaxies related things out there. Here is
a nice HTML converted PowerPoint presentation.
people.memphis.edu
Galaxies will re-define high-end computing. Will it take off?
Yes, absolutely. Why? "VMS is fading". Sure, BUT there are
folks that would run an enhanced version of MS-DOS if it outran
everything else on the planet and would fork over millions for
the privilege.
Let me show you something to >> beware << of:
zdnet.com
Specifically:
Today Digital plans to demonstrate a high-end clustering technology called
Adaptive Partitioned Multi Processing. The initial product, to be run on
Alpha 8400 servers, will be announced in the first half of 1998 and ship by
the third quarter, officials for the Maynard, Mass., company said.
The demonstration will feature Open VMS running on a server that uses
eight 440MHz Alpha CPUs, 1GB of RAM, and hardware partitioning
between nodes to obtain speeds of up to 720MB per second. The
clustering technology, which Digital will also bring to NT, enables a
network administrator to swap processing power between nodes as
needed to balance workloads. The clustering technology can place a
database into memory so every node has direct memory access to a
database to speed transactions.
Question:
Can you find what is obviously wrong with the above snippet?
Answer:
"Digital will also bring [Galaxies] to NT"
I sent e-mail to Erica explaining (with confirmation from folks
that know) that statement is not even close to being correct. Digital
intends to make UNIX and NT on par with VMS clusters as they exist
TODAY. There is very little probability of Galaxies coming to NT.
Two different clustering paradigms with little hope of NT getting
well anytime soon. Heck, NT 5.0 has been pushed back to late 1998.
It takes 64-bit (fully 64-bit) OS as a "minimum" to even begin talking
about Galaxies and even at that it is so subtle and low-level it
would be years before NT got Galaxies if Digital handed Microsoft
the PATENTS (yes patents Erica).
One other thing, it isn't "hardware partitioning". After all, it is
Galaxies SOFTWARE Architecture.
I have tracked down, shot down, about 4 or 5 authors in the last year
that haven't even come close to writing a technically accurate piece
vis-a-vis Digital. It isn't a bit funny anymore. At first I got a
chuckle. Now I shudder. Can it be a lack of collective footwork?
No backgrounding? At one time I thought that. Now you know what I
think? Spin. Every one wants to put their own little spin on things.
I have no problem with that. Just don't spin off into WonderLand.
Time and again accuracy has fallen by the way. The above section
is bad. Writers are absolutely desperate to link Galaxies with
NT. They can't stomach the thought that something like Galaxies is
VMS specific (should be for at least 4 years even if Digital handed
Microsoft the patents). Get used to it!!!!
Rob |
