Amdahl Strengthens Open Systems Storage Offering with High Performance Enhancements to the LVS 4500 Storage System; New Enhancements Increase Performance Up to 50 Percent in UNIX Environment

Business Wire, Oct 21, 1996

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 21, 1996--Amdahl Corporation today announced a complete array of hardware and software product enhancements for the Logical Volume Series (LVS) 4500 Storage System. These upgrades enable users to maintain higher levels of throughput and achieve application performance increases up to 50 percent. These enhancements will be available November 15, 1996. Amdahl announced the LVS 4500 system, its most advanced open systems storage offering to date, earlier this summer.

The upgrades include optional solid state disk drives, A OpenTune/Storage Edition performance and capacity management software and UltraSCSI host bus adapter support for Solaris(R) and Intel(R) based Windows NT(R) environments. With these new features, the LVS 4500 Storage System will better meet the high performance requirements for web server applications, video-on-demand, relational database management systems (RDBMS) and on-line application processing (OLAP). Users can now upgrade to higher throughput and achieve reduced response times for database applications.

"This array of performance and management enhancements strengthens the position of Amdahl as a leader in the open systems storage arena," said Charles Foley, marketing vice president, Enterprise Storage Systems. "The investment made by our customers is protected with the LVS 4500 as Amdahl continues to deliver high performance upgrades to the systems installed there, by meeting market and customer demands."

Solid State Disk Drives

Amdahl added Solid State Disk (SSD) support to increase application performance for users who use relational database management systems. Solid state disks are utilized for heavily accessed objects such as RDBMS indexes and logs. On every data access request to the database, the indexes must be accessed first. By using SSD, these accesses are satisfied at electronic speeds and do not suffer the latency experienced with mechanical disk drives. Overall response time may be reduced by as much as 50 percent with judicious use of the SSD.

Throughput Rates Are Doubled

With the addition of the UltraSCSI host bus adapters for the Solaris and Windows NT environments, the host throughput rate has doubled from 20MB per second to 40MB per second per channel (80MB/sec aggregate), thereby taking full advantage of the LVS 4500 storage system performance architecture. These rates make the LVS 4500 an ideal storage system for high bandwidth applications such as video-on-demand and decision support systems. Additionally, with the UltraSCSI host bus adapters, the LVS 4500 storage system I/O rate accelerates to over 5500 I/Os per second. Such high performance fully complements today's OLTP and RDBMS applications.

Performance Monitoring

A OpenTune/Storage Edition performance tuning tools enable LVS 4500 storage system users to measure the performance of their storage system, allowing them to fine tune and balance their DASD operations in a UNIX(R) environment. A OpenTune/Storage Edition can measure the CPU and memory utilization, I/O transfer rates, and uncover disk bottlenecks, to easily identify system problems such as runaway processes consuming excessive CPU resources, disk "hot spots," and system slowdowns due to memory contention.

About Amdahl Corporation

Amdahl Corporation (AMEX:AMH) provides integrated enterprise computing solutions designed to meet the needs of the leading, most compute-intensive environments around the world. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, Amdahl combines hardware and software products and service methods with best of breed offerings to create customized solutions that help clients gain a competitive advantage in their industries. -0-

Note to Editors: Amdahl is a registered trademark and LVS 4500 is a trademark of Amdahl Corporation. Solaris is a registered trademark of Sun Corporation. UNIX is a registered trademark in the United States and other countries, licensed exclusively through X/Open Company Limited. Windows NT is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks and product names are property of their respective owners.

Amdahl news releases are available on the Internet through Amdahl Corporation's home page at http:\\www.amdahl.com. The Amdahl home page provides current, in-depth information on Amdahl offerings and solutions for enterprise computing.

CONTACT: Amdahl Corporation

Pattie Davis, 408/746-6158

pfd10@amail.amdahl.com

or

The Benjamin Group Inc.

Traci Calderon, 408/559-6090 ext. 304

tcalder@sv.tbgi.com