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Amdahl, MS, Intel to make new servers

Amdahl has collaborated with Microsoft and Intel to create a new family of servers.

Brooke Crothers Former CNET contributor
Brooke Crothers writes about mobile computer systems, including laptops, tablets, smartphones: how they define the computing experience and the hardware that makes them tick. He has served as an editor at large at CNET News and a contributing reporter to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. His interest in things small began when living in Tokyo in a very small apartment for a very long time.
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Brooke Crothers
Mainframe vendor Amdahl has collaborated with Microsoft and Intel to create a new family of servers unveiled today that run Windows NT and use Intel's latest and greatest multiprocessor Pentium Pro server technology.

In what appears to be a seminal announcement for Amdahl, the company is lifting the curtain on new "EnVista" family servers and server technologies and kicking off a Pentium Pro clustering strategy. What's more, the company indicated that it is collaborating with Intel to develop 64-bit Pentium Pro server technology.

The new systems feature:
--the capability to run in clusters with as many as eight other servers
--the use of Intel's newest four-processor Pentium Pro motherboards, developed with Amdahl
--"unprecedented" throughput for direct ESCON channel connection between the Windows NT Server network operating system and a mainframe. The firms achieved throughput rates of 4.8MB per second between an EnVista enterprise server and an System/390 mainframe using Microsoft SNA Server 2

In addition to working on developing 64-bit versions of the Pentium Pro, Amdahl and Intel are collaborating on a "high-speed mesh interconnect" for highly scalable computer systems and system management issues such as remote diagnostics.