Data General Ships Industry's First 32-Processor ccNUMA Server Based On Intel Architecture
WESTBORO, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 3, 1997--
Joins 16-processor AViiON AV 20000 server already installed at
Sainsbury's for multi-terabyte data warehousing application
Data General today announced that it has shipped a 32-processor
AViiON AV 20000 ccNUMA server to world leading retailer Sainsbury's,
with headquarters in the United Kingdom. This represents the
industry's first shipment of a 32-processor ccNUMA system based on
the Intel architecture.
The AV 20000 is Data General's second generation ccNUMA system.
In initial offerings, the AV 20000 can support up to 32 200-MHz
Pentium Pro processors with optional 1 MB L2 cache, 32 GB of memory,
and 100 Terabytes of fault-tolerant CLARiiON fibre channel storage. In
clustered configurations, the processor count grows to 128. Future
systems will continue to leverage the Intel technology roadmap and the
ccNUMA architecture which can scale to hundreds of processors.
Sainsbury's is using their two AV 20000 servers for a data
warehousing application based on the Oracle database. This
multi-terabyte data warehouse stores information about Sainsbury's
customers collected at the point of sale through their loyalty card
program.
"Sainsbury's is investing in technology that will allow the
company get closer to its customers. Data General's AV 20000 ccNUMA
server has proven to be a flexible platform, allowing that us to adapt
and extend our data warehouse to three terabytes in the near future,"
said Martin Wright, IS Infrastructure Manager at Sainsbury's. "It has
delivered the performance and scalability that we required."
"We are extremely pleased with the success we've had with the AV
20000. Now, being the first to ship a 32-processor Intel-based ccNUMA
system clearly demonstrates Data General's leadership in using this
architecture to build highly scalable servers. It is a considerable
achievement for our engineering group," said Linda Mentzer, vice
president of UNIX marketing at Data General. "Data warehousing is one
of our target markets for this system. Sainsbury's represents the kind
of successful collaboration we anticipate with other customers."
Scalable Performance
Like the already installed 16-processor AV 20000 server, this
32-processor system passed a series of rigorous performance
scalability acceptance tests developed by Sainsbury's. These tests
showed scalability averaging 92%. The AV 20000 has demonstrated
similar scaling in other benchmarks using actual customer
applications, outperforming much larger MPP systems.
With this system, Sainsbury's will now be able to analyze
information collected from its customer loyalty card program to
develop merchandising programs to attract and retain more customers.
Key to the success has been the effective alliance between
Sainsbury's, SHL System House, the UK arm of MCI System House, and
Data General.
Using a CLARiiON disk farm with over one terabyte of data storage
initially, Sainsbury's expects the system to grow quickly to three
terabytes, making it one of the largest data warehouses in Europe.
"The data warehouse system holds a lot of data, and enables us to
retrieve and analyze it very quickly," notes Wright. "Over the next
two to three years we expect the amount of information processed to
increase dramatically. Sainsbury's is confident that the AViiON ccNUMA
servers will support this growth."
Up to 300 business users will interrogate the warehouse using a
mix of business intelligence tools, including BRANN Viper and
Information Advantage, depending on the nature of the queries.
Other AV 20000 Customers
**********Other AV 20000 customers include the Bloomberg Financial Markets;**********
City of Temple in Texas, F.W. Webb, HBO and Co., and Vanguard Cellular
in the US; the Directorate of Information Systems in Belfast, Northern
Ireland; Booker Food Group, Booker Belmont Wholesale, FSS Travel &
Leisure Ltd., GBS Youngman, H P Bulmer Ltd, Texaco Ltd., and Travis
Perkins Trading Co., in the UK; Universidade do Minho in Portugal; the
Cairo Stock Exchange in Egypt; Gribbles Pathology in Australia, and
Teaseung in Korea.
Business Warehouse Program
Data General recently announced the expansion of its Business
Warehouse Program to target selected industries (retail, healthcare,
telecommunications, and manufacturing), using the highly scalable
AViiON AV 20000 ccNUMA-based server as the hardware platform. The
company signed agreements with Constellar, Information Advantage,
Quadstone, and VMARK Software to provide an integrated application
solutions framework. Initially, this framework will be based on
Oracle8 Universal Data Server, Oracle Express, and Oracle Discover.
Second Generation NUMA
The AViiON AV 20000 is the second generation of ccNUMA
technology-based systems from Data General. The company has been
shipping 16- and 32-processor AV 10000 ccNUMA systems based on the
Motorola 88000 CPUs since early 1996.
About Data General
Data General (NYSE:DGN), based in Westboro, Massachusetts,
specializes in servers, storage systems, and related software and
services for customers worldwide. The company reported revenues of
$1.53 billion during fiscal 1997. Additional information on the
company, its products and services is available on the Internet at
dg.com
AViiON and CLARiiON are registered trademarks of Data General
Corporation.
All brand and product names appearing in the press release may be
trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.
CONTACT: Data General Data General
Jim Dunlap Carlos Soares
508/898-6546 508/898-6674
jim_dunlap@dg.com carlos_soares@dgc.ceo.dg.com |
