New Sequent Systems Extend Leadership in High-End Open Systems
Symmetry Platforms Advance Scalability, Availability for Decision Support and OLTP Solutions
BEAVERTON, Ore. - April 17, 1995 Sequent Computer Systems, Inc., today announced new Symmetry 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 100 MHz Pentium 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 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 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.
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.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 4.1 and QCIC-E controllers, the High Density Memory Controller increases total physical memory available on SE70 systems to 3.5 GB.
Operating System
A new version of DYNIX/ptx Sequent s SMP-enhanced version of the UNIX? 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.Increased Availability
Sequent also announced ptx/EFS (Enhanced File System ), which significantly improves system availability by dramatically reducing the amount of time required to recover a system following a failure. It provides intent logging, which dramatically reduces file system recovery time; extent-based allocation, which provides higher performance for databases that use file systems as their storage medium; support for online file system resizing, which allows system configuration changes to be made without system downtime; and online file system defragmentation, which allows for file system tuning without system downtime. ptxEFS is scheduled to be available in May. Finally, Sequent announced ptx/CLUSTERS 1.3, a new release of Sequent's high-availability system software, scheduled to be available in September. Version 1.3 introduces Sequent s Scalable Data Interconnect (SDI) technology, which provides a direct, memory-to-memory or node-to-node communication pipeline that allows cooperating applications such as an upcoming version of Oracle7 from Oracle Corp. to use all the processing power of CPUs in a multinode cluster to process database queries. The SDI technology allows customers to take advantage of out-of-box scaling to handle database queries of the largest order.Sequent Computer Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SQNT), based in Beaverton, Ore., is a leading architect and provider of open client/server systems for business computing. Sequent provides professional consulting, educational and support services and develops scalable multiprocessing computing systems.
The World Wide Web address for Sequent OnLine is http://www. sequent.com/. This news release and other information is available from Sequent's news-on-demand fax service at (800) 356-0834.
Sequent, Symmetry and DYNIX/ptx are registered trademarks and ptx/CLUSTERS and Enhanced File System are trademarks of Sequent Computer Systems, Inc.
Intel is a registered trademark and Pentium is a trademark of Intel Corp.
Oracle is a registered trademark and Oracle7 is a trademark of Oracle Corp.
UNIX is a registered trademark in the United States and other countries, licensed exclusively through X/Open Company Limited.
Sequent Broadens High-Availability Offering
New and Enhanced Professional Services and Products Provide Complete, Integrated High-Availability Solution
BEAVERTON, Ore. - April 17, 1995 Sequent Computer Systems, Inc., today announced new and enhanced professional services, and hardware and software products that significantly extend its high-availability solution for users of very large databases. The integrated Sequent solution helps customers assess, design, install, monitor and support highly available open systems environments for mission-critical applications requiring near-continuous operation. The elements announced today, including three new professional services, a new clustered Symmetry 5000 system, and high-availability software, are key deliverables in Sequent's strategy to provide high-availability solutions based on a balanced set of services and products.
"High availability demands more than shrink-wrapped solutions," said Paul O Mara, vice president and general manager of the Enterprise Division at Sequent. "It requires a complex combination of products integrated to work together and people trained to follow specific procedures developed with availability in mind. With years of experience providing high-availability solutions to customers and hundreds of installations to date, Sequent offers the knowledge needed to help organizations address these challenges and create an integrated, highly available system environment for their mission-critical applications."
Sequent helps organizations address the three areas critical to achieving a successful high-availability solution:
New Professional Services
The new professional services announced today include the availability assessment, a high availability competency center, and data-center management.The availability assessment is a unique service that helps customers understand what they must do to achieve high availability. Sequent consultants work with organizations to analyze their business needs and goals and systems availability requirements. All business aspects that can impact availability are evaluated, including personnel training and procedures, and the technology deployed. The entire customer system, including databases, applications and end-user environments, is evaluated and a recommendation report is provided. The availability assessment service is priced according to project requirements and will be available in the third quarter of 1995.
Sequent has also established a high-availability competency center, based on its successful experience implementing highly available production environments for very large database customers.
In the center, leading technology and major products are integrated and optimized in a highly available production environment. This advance work provides Sequent customers with fast, smooth and successful installations, and effective high-availability solutions.
In addition, Sequent is introducing a data center rapid start program designed to help large commercial customers implement open systems quickly.
The program includes a framework for the policies, procedures and tools necessary in a UNIX data center, as well as consulting services to help customers put them in place. Included in the framework are guidelines for staffing, security, disaster recovery, capacity planning, help-desk operations, service-level agreements and change management. The consulting team, consisting of a project manager, data-center manager, system administrator and database administrator, is responsible for implementing the data-center policies, procedures and tools and customizing them to meet individual customer needs. The rapid start program takes four to six months, will be available starting in the second quarter of 1995.
These new offerings extend the high-availability services Sequent currently offers, which include system configuration and tuning, highly available database configuration and tuning, and design and installation of client failover environments.
New Systems and Software
The high-availability system announced today is the Symmetry 5000 SE100, a ready-to-run configuration of up to four clustered symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) systems. Clustered systems provide increased system availability over single systems by recovering from a failure in a matter of minutes rather than hours. The Symmetry SE100 will be available in June.Sequent is also introducing ptx/EFS (Enhanced File System ), which significantly improves system availability by reducing file system recovery after system failure from minutes to seconds. It also allows system administration activities to be performed while the system is running, further improving availability. Available for both single systems and clustered systems in May.
In addition, Sequent is announcing a new release of its high-availability software, ptx/CLUSTERS Version 1.3. The new version adds out-of-box scalability to Sequent high-availability products when used with cluster-aware databases such as Oracle Parallel Server (OPS). The combination of OPS with ptx/CLUSTERS permits large-scale queries and batch workloads to scale across nodes in a cluster, thus completing the task faster than otherwise possible. ptx/CLUSTERS is scheduled to be available in September.
High-availability software has also been employed in systems using other database products. The new releases are designed to provide enhanced availability environments for all of Sequent database partners.
Sequent Computer Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SQNT), based in Beaverton, Ore., is a leading architect and provider of open client/server systems for business computing. Sequent provides professional consulting, educational and support services, and develops scalable multiprocessing computing systems.
The World Wide Web address for Sequent OnLine is http://www. sequent.com/. This news release and other information is available from Sequent's news-on-demand fax service at (800) 356-0834.
Sequent and Symmetry are registered trademarks and ptx/CLUSTERS and Enhanced File System are trademarks of Sequent Computer Systems, Inc.
Oracle is a registered trademark and Oracle Parallel Server is a trademark of Oracle Corp.
UNIX is a registered trademark in the United States and other countries, licensed exclusively through X/Open Company Limited.
Sequent Announces Breakthrough Technology For Decision-Support Applications
New Capability Speeds Large-Scale Queries by Using All Processors in Four-Node Cluster
BEAVERTON, Ore. - April 17, 1995 Sequent Computer Systems, Inc., today announced new technology providing breakthrough performance for very large decision-support applications. The advanced parallel technology, called Scalable Data Interconnect (SDI), expands the performance of Sequent symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) systems by allowing complex queries to be distributed across more than 100 Intel Pentium processors in a system consisting of multiple SMP nodes clustered together.
With the SDI technology, users can obtain results of complex queries on very large data warehouses up to 100 times faster than with previous single-threaded query capabilities. SDI increases the range of applications where proven SMP technology can be used to meet the processing demands of enterprises that are implementing large-scale decision-support data warehouses.
SDI further expands the performance range of Sequent's SMP systems, enabling the power of distributed processing to transparently scale the performance of decision-support queries across multiple nodes of a Sequent clustered configuration. Sequent's clustered configurations support the integrated operation of up to four Symmetry 5000 systems, with a combined total of up to 120 Intel Pentium processors. All current Sequent systems are SDI-ready. Oracle Corp. will deliver a version of Oracle7 later this year that will take advantage of SDI to process a query in parallel using processors on multiple nodes in an SMP cluster.
The combination of SDI and Oracle7 will allow users of Oracle7 to transparently apply the enormous processing power of SDI clusters to the parallel execution of complex parallel queries in very large data-warehouse environments. This advanced technology will allow more users to generate flexible queries against larger databases with faster response times.
"The increasing commercial demand for decision support has sparked enormous growth in the size of databases and the complexity of queries," said Lary Evans, vice president and general manager of the Platform Division at Sequent. "By delivering an advanced combination of high-performance parallel query operation and highly available mission-critical databases, Sequent is providing new data management capabilities that enable businesses to extract real, measurable value from the data they collect and far more quickly than was previously possible."
SDI is the latest achievement from Sequent's cooperative alliance with Oracle, in which the two companies work together to apply the benefits of open SMP technology to solve business problems in commercial computing. SDI is an extension of joint development work on the Oracle Parallel Server, which has been available on Sequent systems since 1993 and is in use at some of the largest commercial sites in the world. "Oracle will take full advantage of Sequent's SDI technology with specific database enhancements later this year," said Richard French, vice president of the Intel UNIX products division at Oracle. "We will fully support SDI to leverage all the processors in a distributed SMP query. With SDI, Sequent has demonstrated the ability to deliver this key decision-support function."
The Evolution of Clustered SMP Systems
SDI represents the next logical step in the evolution of SMP systems. Clustered Symmetry SMP systems deliver both the high performance and high availability required by today s business-critical decision-support applications. Symmetry clusters can be configured for application and database failover, and with the addition of Oracle Parallel Server technology, clusters enable out-of-box scalability as well as higher availability. With the introduction of SDI, business problems previously thought solvable only through the use of proprietary or exotic massively parallel processing (MPP) can be handled by proven, mature clustered SMP solutions.Scalable Data Interconnect
SDI consists of integrated hardware and software technology including an I/O controller, firmware and cluster software that provides up to 200MB-per-second memory-to-memory channels that can be used exclusively as a high-speed data pump between instances of Oracle7 on separate nodes.Sequent's SDI and related components are scheduled to be available in the third quarter of 1995. To take advantage of SDI, users must have the Oracle7 upgrade that will be available later this year, Sequent's new QCIC-E I/O controllers, DYNIX/ptx 4.1, ptx/CLUSTERS 1.3 and ptx/SDI software. Pricing is dependent on system configuration.
Sequent Computer Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SQNT), based in Beaverton, Ore., is a leading architect and provider of open client/server systems for business computing. Sequent provides professional consulting, educational and support services, and develops scalable multiprocessing computing systems.
The World Wide Web address for Sequent OnLine is http://www. sequent.com/. This news release and other information is available from Sequent's news-on-demand fax service at (800) 356-0834.
Sequent, Symmetry and DYNIX/ptx are registered trademarks and ptx/CLUSTERS is a trademark of Sequent Computer Systems, Inc.
Intel is a registered trademark and Pentium is a trademark of Intel Corp.
Oracle is a registered trademark and Oracle7 and Oracle Parallel Server are trademarks of Oracle Corp.
UNIX is a registered trademark in the United States and other countries, licensed exclusively through X/Open Company Limited.