New Sequent Systems Extend Leadership in High-End Open Systems; Symmetry Platforms Advance Scalability, Availability for Decision Support and OLTP Solutions

Business Wire, April 17, 1995

BEAVERTON, Ore.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 17, 1995--Sequent Computer Systems Inc. today announced new Symmetry(R) systems that extend balanced performance in processor, memory and I/O to support mission-critical enterprise solutions in online transaction processing (OLTP) and decision support.

The new systems -- together with other new technology and professional services announced today -- further demonstrate Sequent's leadership in large-scale solutions and high-end open symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) systems for the enterprise.

The new systems -- the Symmetry 5000 SE30, SE70 and SE100 -- incorporate the Intel(R) 100 MHz Pentium(TM) processor as well as enhancements to I/O controllers, memory controllers, operating system and systems software. They extend the size and scope of situations where Symmetry systems can be used for enterprise-level applications. With these new systems, Sequent continues its 12-year leadership in providing balanced, scalable servers that help organizations make the transition from proprietary computing to open-enterprise computing.

"Sequent continues to invest in developing technology that advances the capabilities of our enterprise-class solutions," said Lary Evans, vice president and general manager of the Platform Division at Sequent. "Our new systems and technologies -- with their higher-performance processors, faster I/O throughput, and greater memory capacity -- reflect our design philosophy of creating balanced commercial enterprise servers to address the requirements of OLTP and decision-support environments."

Extending Scalability

The three Symmetry 5000 systems announced today offer OLTP performance increases of 1.3 times over earlier models and 1.5 times higher for decision-support applications. In Symmetry 5000 systems, the new processors and current memory and I/O controllers can interoperate with existing 66 MHz Pentium processors, a key advantage to users wishing to take advantage of faster processing without losing investments in existing technology. Users of Sequent's previous generation of systems -- the Symmetry 2000 family -- can use Sequent's existing Advance 5000 program to upgrade their Symmetry systems to the newer models.

The SE30 is targeted at midrange departmental OLTP or decision-support applications where a large relational database management system is in use. Hundreds of users can be supported on the SE30. The SE30 supports from two to 10 Pentium processors, 3.5 GB of physical memory and 504 GB of online storage. The list price of an entry-level configuration is approximately $154,000.

The SE70 is designed for large enterprise OLTP or decision-support data warehouse applications needing high performance and the ability to meet continuing application growth. Thousands of users can be supported on the SE70. The SE70 supports from two to 30 Pentium processors, 3.5 GB of physical memory and up to 1.7 TB of online storage. The list price of an entry-level configuration is approximately $339,000.

The SE100 is a family of highly available clustered configurations containing two to four SE30 or SE70 systems. The SE100 family, in addition to providing the performance advantages of balanced SMP computing, adds clustering to support very large user populations and provide fault-resiliency in the event of a system failure. The list price of an entry-level SE100 two-node configuration starts at approximately $538,000.

Technology Enhancements

Sequent also announced the Enhanced Quad Channel I/O controller (QCIC-E), a disk controller that increases the efficiency of I/O transfers across the Symmetry 5000 Highly Scalable Bus by about 40 percent. As online storage requirements increase, the QCIC-E reduces the number of system bus cycles required to process I/O requests. By decreasing system overhead associated with I/O, the QCIC-E allows customers who operate large systems to make better use of all the resources (e.g., processor and memory) configured in a system. The QCIC-E is scheduled to be available in June and is sold separately, except in the case of the SE100, where it is an integral component. It is priced at approximately $25,000.

Sequent also announced the addition of a Symmetry High Density Memory Controller. The new controller gives customers the ability to configure 1 GB of memory per system slot. For users of today's sophisticated application systems, increased memory provides increased performance and user capacities. When used in conjunction with DYNIX/ptx(R) 4.1 and QCIC-E controllers, the High Density Memory Controller increases total physical memory available on SE70 systems to 3.5 GB. The new memory controller is priced at approximately $100,000.

Operating System

A new version of DYNIX/ptx -- Sequent's SMP-enhanced version of the UNIX(R) operating system -- supports the hardware capabilities included in today's announcement. DYNIX/ptx 4.1 provides support for large physical memory capacities (3.5 GB), larger disk partitions (1 TB), and an SNMP Management Host MIB. DYNIX/ptx 4.1 conforms to the ABI standard, allowing binaries compiled to this standard to be executed unchanged on a Symmetry system. The operating system is scheduled to be available in May and is priced starting at approximately $9,000 for a 25-user license.