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To: George Dvorsky who wrote (16944)	2/6/1998 11:00:00 PM
From: George Dvorsky	Respond to of 97611

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

To: George Dvorsky who wrote (16944)	2/7/1998 7:19:00 AM
From: WeisbrichA	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 97611

GD, Thanks for the substantial reply. The processor obviously has more power than can be used by NT for some time. However, I get the impression that the OpenVMS and Unix implemented on this platform, especially, with the number of processors and nodes is well beyond today's "Mainframe". What I think is also impressive, is that the OpenMVS can be easily tailored to specific application environments. Based upon what I have gleaned so far, IMO, CPQ will not sunset this project. May even push as a rival to Merced if DEC can adequately solve scalability on NT. I don't know what blue has in its stable for 98-99, but I would be worried about my mainframe business, and especially the Unix based apps. --------- " With Alpha 21264, Digital delivers another proof point of its innovative capabilities," said Karl-Heinz Hess, Executive vice president, Systems Technology, SAP AG. "The previous Alpha generation has proved its reliability and its impact on the SAP market. R/3 as been successfully implemented worldwide on Alpha based servers - on Windows NT as well as on UNIX. We expect the 21264 Alpha to further strengthen Digital's position in the SAP market." Is DEC using R/3 on Unix in house? Innovative?? Was DEC a beta for R/3?? ----------- The Alpha 21264 processor family will deliver online transaction processing (OLTP) performance far beyond that of any other computing platform. Digital expects Alpha 21264 microprocessors to achieve OLTP performance two to four times current levels. That certainly answered question on performance in more "real world" benchmarks. 1,000,000 TMP.... if they can deliver half that! Where have all their marketing people gone? They should be SHOUTING about this. IMHO <(:-].. RW