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To: Francis Chow who wrote (58845)	6/26/1998 10:25:00 AM
From: Francis Chow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Chipmakers' 2nd Quarter Earnings Seen Lower: nytsyn.com U.S. Software Makers' 2nd Quarter Profit to Rise: nytsyn.com Firms back away from DRAMs: news.com

To: Francis Chow who wrote (58845)	6/26/1998 12:18:00 PM
From: herb will	Respond to of 186894

Francis, I think this is one that you overlooked in your selection of daily tidbits. Some very interesting comments by Casey Powell, Sequent Computer's Head Honcho. zdnet.com Sequent moves ahead on mainframe assault By John S. McCright, PC Week Online 06.22.98 Sequent revs NUMA The move to NUMA Faintly -- some years in the future -- Casey Powell can hear the sound of a truck hauling the last mainframe to the junkyard. The chairman and CEO of Sequent Computer Systems Inc. believes his company's NUMA-Q servers, with their Intel Corp. chips, WILL SPELL THE END OF THE MAINFRAME, JUST AS THE PC SERVER SPELLED THE END OF THE MINICOMPUTER EARLIER THIS DECADE. "When was the last time you saw a minicomputer? It's gone," said Powell in an interview at PC Expo here last week. "WITH THE ADVENT OF [INTEL'S FORTHCOMING 64-BIT] MERCED CHIP, THIS IS WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO THE MAINFRAME." Sequent, of Beaverton, Ore., last week announced the availability of NUMA-Q servers with multipath Fibre Channel connections to up to 16 ports in an EMC Corp. Symmetrix Enterprise Storage System. This technology will enable the Unix servers to support 16 I/O paths instead of the typical two, thus improving server performance, officials said. The introduction next week of Intel's next-generation Pentium II chip, Xeon, will enable Sequent to increase the number of chips in its NUMA-Q servers from 32 to 64, Powell said. That version of NUMA-Q, code-named Scorpion, is due by year's end. But that's just the beginning; the Sequent architecture can support up to 252 chips. Because those chips are Intel-based and can run Unix and Windows NT, Powell believes organizations will move from closed mainframe systems to systems that make it easier to get data center-based information to a growing number of corporate end users. "Companies want distributed decision making but centralized information," he said. Organizations may also abandon their mainframes in 2000 if IT managers and CIOs discover that date problems in mainframe software prove to be more trouble to correct than they are worth. "People have avoided the [year 2000] problem," Powell said. "All those places you see booking lots of millennium parties for Jan. 31, 1999, will be booked a month before with a lot of retirement parties." Herb