On Nov. 1, Intel officially introduced its Pentium Pro processor. At that
time HPCwire published a brief list of vendors and products that would
support the new processor. (See HPCwire article 8042 "200 MHz Intel Pentium
Pro Benchmarks at 366 SPECint92" Nov. 3, 1995). Earlier this week, Intel
hosted a special event where vendors supporting the Pentium Pro demonstrated
their products. Following is a round-up of subsequent Pentium Pro product
announcements.

DIGITAL TO DEVELOP PENTIUM PRO PROCESSOR SMP ENTERPRISE SERVERS
  Maynard, Mass. -- Digital Equipment Corp. announced that it will
extend its family of Prioris servers with a superserver based on Intel's
recently announced Pentium Pro processor. At an Intel Corp. press conference,
Digital demonstrated a four processor symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP)
superserver based on 200MHz Intel Pentium Pro microprocessors. The Prioris
Pentium Pro superserver is scheduled to ship in the first quarter of 1996.
The upcoming machine will be targeted at the most performance-intensive
applications in client/server computing, including large database tasks,
multimedia and high-traffic Internet communications and will be scalable from
one-to-four CPUs in an SMP configuration. To ensure maximum availability and
performance for mission-critical tasks, the Pentium Pro system will feature
ECC memory, hot-swappable disk drives, redundant power and cooling, Fast/Wide
SCSI, multichannel RAID and high-bandwidth PCI I/O. When it is commercially
available, the new Prioris superserver will support a wide range of operating
environments, including Windows NT Server 3.51; Novell NetWare 3.X, 4.X and
NetWare SMP; SCO UnixWare; SCO Open Server 5.0; IBM OS/2 SMP; Banyan VINES;
and Digital PATHWORKS. The Digital World Wide Web homepage is at
<http://www.pc.digital.com>.

ZENITH'S Z-SERVER SMP SYSTEM SUPPORTS PENTIUM PRO
  New York, N.Y. -- Zenith Data Systems (ZDS) announced that the popular
Z-Server line will support the latest technology from Intel, the Pentium Pro
processor. ZDS is demonstrating the new technology in a Z-Server symmetric
multiprocessing (SMP) system that supports up to four processors. The server
features six PCI and four EISA slots, five external bays, 12 hot-plug disk
drives and up to 1GB of ECC memory. The Pentium Pro processor-based Z-Server
also supports all major operating systems. The scalable four-way SMP Z-Server
will be available from authorized Zenith Data Systems resellers worldwide in
the first half of 1996, based on Intel's shipment of the new Pentium Pro
processor scheduled for the first quarter of 1996. For more information, see
Web site <http://www.zds.com>.

ORACLE DEMONSTRATES SCALABLE CLUSTER SOLUTION ON PENTIUM PRO SERVERS
  New York, N.Y. -- Oracle Corp. recently demonstrated an Oracle7 Parallel
Server running on standard Intel-based servers and a shrink-wrapped Unix
operating system. The configuration illustrated how emerging standard
Intel-based servers running Oracle7 parallel technology can provide a viable
addition to existing Oracle7 cluster implementations. Instead of using
systems designed with proprietary mainframe technologies, customers and
integrators can use Oracle7 and standard Intel-based server technologies to
deploy scalable applications throughout an organization. The Oracle7 Parallel
Server uses a Distributed Lock Manager (DLM) to track the state and location
of data and locks across multiple nodes. If one node becomes unavailable,
users on the remaining nodes can continue to update the database. The
remaining nodes automatically recover committed work on the unavailable node
without intervention from a database administrator, minimizing downtime and
ensuring the integrity of mission-critical data. The Oracle7 Parallel Server
demonstration runs on a four-node cluster. Each node consists of a Compaq
ProLiant Pentium Pro 4-Processor SMP server, connected to a disk array by
shared SCSI, and to each other by a private ethernet. The nodes run Oracle7
Parallel Server release 7.2 and a future release of UnixWare. Oracle's World
Wide Web address is <http://www.oracle.com/>.

SEQUENT PREMIERS NUMA-Q ARCHITECTURE BASED ON PENTIUM PRO
  New York, N.Y. -- Sequent Computer Systems Inc. demonstrated the base
building block for its NUMA-Q system architecture at a special event
showcasing the Pentium Pro processor in enterprise server applications.
A NUMA-Q system with four-Pentium Pro processors was clustered with a
10-Pentium-processor Sequent Symmetry 5000 system. The clustered system
performed a live fail-over and recovery of Sequent's data warehouse solution
for Oracle 7, illustrating NUMA-Q's ability to provide availability in
mission-critical settings. Sequent's NUMA-Q architecture uses Intel's Pentium
Pro processor as the building block for a new class of systems that scales to
252 processors and handles multiple terabytes of data. In a separate
demonstration a Sequent Symmetry 5000 SE60 parallel computer was used to
provide critical back-end database services in a three-tier SAP R/3
application demonstration. The World Wide Web address for Sequent Online is
<http://www.sequent.com/>.

DATA GENERAL WILL DELIVER PENTIUM PRO AVIION SERVERS
  Westboro, Mass. -- Data General will offer a complete family of AViiON
servers based on Intel's Pentium Pro processors beginning early in 1996.
The new systems will complement Data General's current AViiON servers,
running either the DG/UX enterprise operating system or Windows NT Server,
and will support 15,000 existing AViiON applications. The SHV (Standard High
Volume) server boards combine up to four Intel Pentium Pro processors,
memory, cache and I/O. Data General will use multiple SHV boards in AViiON
servers that will run today's Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) applications
without modification. Additional information is available at Web site
<http://www.dg.com>.