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Technology Stocks : EMC How high can it go? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tony Viola who wrote (8827)	1/20/2000 4:43:00 PM
From: bob gauthier	Respond to of 17183

Article in this weeks 'Information Week' magazine, Jan 17th issue: NUMA Earns Health-Care Client Baptist Health will consolidate operations on one platform By Martin J. Garvey Baptist Health, a $300 million health network, will turn over operating-room scheduling for patients and staff to four of EMC Corp.'s Data General Aviion AV 25000 NUMA servers, each running four 550-MHz Intel Pentium Xeon processors. The Montgomery, Ala., network of hospitals, care centers, and nursing homes says it chose Non-Uniform Memory Access technology because the highly scalable, symmetric multiprocessing architecture will let it move ahead with plans to consolidate as many operations as possible onto a single platform. NUMA technology lets each CPU primarily read from and write to its own local memory, which it can access more quickly than remote memory. The AV 25000 line can be upgraded to its full 64 CPUs and 64 Gbytes of memory without suffering the performance degradations that can hamper SMP systems that don't support NUMA. Baptist Health CIO Bill Colmer says the flexibility, performance, availability, and scalability of the AV 25000 all played a part in the decision to choose Data General. "We provide health care to the people of Alabama 24-by-7-by-365, and systems must be available to us whenever we need them," Colmer says. "On more than one occasion, we've had difficulty with other machines." Baptist Health also plans to create a medical-record repository on its NUMA systems. The historical information alone will amount to 1 terabyte of data, but Colmer says he isn't concerned about system scalability. "It's absolutely a building-block architecture," he says. "We can wheel in a unit, plug in a processor board, and it picks up the workload." Baptist Health spent about $750,000 for the servers with Data General's Clariion storage technology. But Colmer says he has the flexibility to order EMC's high-end Symmetrix storage for the systems in the future, as his requirements grow--an option that wouldn't have been possible before EMC's October acquisition of Data General. Steve Aucoin, Data General's director of Aviion systems marketing, says Symmetrix storage systems will be a likely place to apply NUMA technology in the future. However, Illuminata analyst Jonathan Eunice maintains that Data General hasn't overcome concerns about the future of its NUMA servers under EMC's ownership. "EMC acquired Data General for the Clariion storage unit," Eunice says. "Data General's server business still operates as strong as ever, but that doesn't always play out with customers at purchase time."