Data General's new AViiON servers set standard for enterprise computing performance; First company to ship Intel-Based Pentium Pro SHV enterprise servers

Business Wire, July 15, 1996

WESTBORO, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 15, 1996--Demonstrating its leadership in the enterprise server market, Data General Corp. today announced that it has begun volume shipments of two new servers based on the Intel Pentium Pro Standard High Volume (SHV) motherboard. Data General's AViiON AV 4900 and AV 5900 servers give customers exceptional reliability and availability to support their business-critical computing needs.

"With their performance, scalability and high availability features, our new AViiON systems are the first true enterprise-level servers to use Intel's SHV boards," said David Ellenberger, vice president of Corporate Marketing, Data General. "The Pentium Pro processor-based AViiON servers more than match the performance level of systems based on proprietary RISC chips -- giving customers a high-performance, industry-standard solution, along with the cost benefits of high volume commodity Intel economics."

AViiON enterprise servers

Data General's AV 4900 office and AV 5900 rackmounted enterprise servers are based on the Intel motherboards, which have up to four 166 MHz or 200 MHz Pentium Pro processors, 512KB cache, and a maximum of 4GB of memory. The systems can access up to 5 terabytes of fault-tolerant CLARiiON storage. Three operating systems, the company's DG/UX, SCO UnixWare System or Microsoft Windows NT Server, supporting more than 15,000 commercial applications, are available with the new AViiON servers.

At the system level, high availability for business-critical applications is provided with fully redundant power and cooling; automated recovery from CPU, memory and disk channel failures; and multi-path I/O. The servers also include Data General's proprietary AV/Alert and NT/Alert automated problem detection software which supports diagnostics, machine-initiated call-out to worldwide country service centers, and remote assistance.

Recent benchmarking tests have demonstrated the robust, powerful performance of the AViiON Pentium Pro servers. An AV 5900 outfitted with four 166 MHz Pentium Pro processors recently outperformed RISC based systems from IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Digital Equipment and Siemens Nixdorf in the SPECint_rate_base95 benchmark. Last week, an AV 4900 running Sybase SQL Server 11 produced the best Transaction Processing Council Benchmark C (TPC-C) performance per CPU to date. And, the AV 4900 was chosen as an "Analyst's Choice" by PC Week last month, following tests conducted by PC Week Labs comparing six Pentium Pro processor based systems.

David House, senior vice president, general manager of Intel's Enterprise Server Group, said, "Data General's benchmark results clearly show that the Pentium Pro processor is competitive with any proprietary RISC processor in terms of delivering performance for enterprise-class workloads. These new servers demonstrate the advantages of using low-cost, high-performance SHV baseboards to construct highly scalable systems that can handle the largest enterprise applications. The combination of Data General's experience with large-scale, mission-critical system deployments and the power of this platform, provides customers with an excellent solution for a broad range of computing needs."

Complete enterprise solutions

The AV 4900 and AV 5900 servers can be combined with Data General's fault-tolerant CLARiiON disk arrays to provide continuous data access and the highest level of data integrity. CLARiiON systems deliver the industry's leading high availability RAID storage solutions for open enterprise environments.

In addition, the new AViiON servers can also be clustered to provide both scalable performance and high availability. Up to eight AViiON systems can share resources, such as applications and storage, while presenting a single-system view to users and systems administrators.

"This announcement represents another step forward in Data General's roadmap to the introduction of powerful high-end AViiON systems based on NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) architecture," continued Data General's Ellenberger. "These systems, to be introduced late this year, will extend SMP capabilities using the company's NUMALiiNE technology, including high speed, industry- standard Scalable Coherent Interface (SCI) interconnect, and sophisticated operating system techniques to create a shared memory system. As a result, the thousands of SMP applications available today can run on NUMA systems without modification."

Last month, the company established a NUMALiiNE Business Unit to develop OEM relationships and a worldwide distribution network for its NUMA technology and systems. Several leading companies, including ICL in the United Kingdom, Dansk Data Elektronik in Denmark and Daewoo Telecom in Korea, have announced plans to integrate NUMALiiNE technology into their high-end servers.

Pricing and availability

Available immediately, pricing for the 166 MHz Pentium Pro based AV 4900 and AV 5900 servers starts at $34,995. Pricing for the 200 MHz AV 4900 and AV 5900 servers, which will be available within 60 days, starts at $39,995.