DG Adds to Fibre Channel, NUMA Options - Product Announcement

Data General Corp. (Westboro, Mass.) beefed up its high-end Intel-based Aviion server systems and announced a major upgrade to its Clariion business unit's Clariion disk technology. While Windows NT users can make use of the new disk products almost immediately, lack of Windows NT support for the new server line will limit that line's value to Data General UNIX customers.

The AV2000 Server exploits Data General's NUMAliine, a version of the non-uniform memory access (NUMA) architecture from Sequent Corp. (Beaverton, Ore.). NUMAliine extends symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) support up to 32 ways. On the storage side, the Clariion FC5000 Series uses the emerging Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL) industry standard, which promises to at least double the performance levels of today's ultra SCSI disk arrays -- at least for those servers that can benefit from such levels of performance.

The Aviion server is Data General's first Intel-based system to use its NUMAliine SMP technology, which enables the machine to support up to 32 200-MHz Pentium Pro processors, 32 GB of memory and 100 terabytes of Clariion fibre channel storage. In addition, up to 128 processors (four fully loaded Aviion servers) can be used in clustered configurations for even greater scalability.

However, Data General has no plans to sell NUMAliine systems for Windows NT applications. "The only time we will port [NUMAliine technology] over to NT is when Microsoft starts the initiative," says Bob Abraham, Clariion manager of market development. Because Microsoft is focused on extending SMP support to eight-way systems with Windows NT V5.0, adding support for NUMA architectures, including Data General's NUMAliine and NUMA Q systems from Sequent, is a low-priority issue.

Clariion's FC5000 Series of RAID disk arrays is based on its Multidimensional Storage Architecture (MSA), a FC-AL framework for deploying storage throughout enterprise networks. The FC5000 uses a dual 100-MBps loop to daisy-chain multiple disks into an array using a building-block approach.

MSA enables a corporation to deploy storage pools that are tailored to specific business needs and application requirements that administrators can manage from a single workstation using Clariion's Navisphere Enterprise Storage Pool Management software tools.

"Applications being implemented by enterprises today are placing diverging requirements on storage systems. The days when a single type of storage device could provide cost-effective performance for all applications are gone forever. That's where MSA can help," says Larry Hemmerich, Clariion vice president and general manager.

The FC5000 series comprises several building blocks, including the FC5000 Disk Array Enclosure; the FC5500 Disk Processor Enclosure, which includes the disk control unit; the FC5200 Host-Based RAID Controller; and fibre channel hubs, switches and adapters. A FC5000 system can be set up in either non-RAID JBOD or RAID configurations, with each of the subsystems supporting up to 120 individual disks.

Individual components are connected with fibre channel cables, hubs and switches to form MSA storage networks. By exploiting MSA technology, the Clariion FC5000 series can grow and be reconfigured as corporate application needs change and mature over time. "NT is one of our strategic operating systems, and we're busy working on attachment kits that enable you to hook up our fibre channel solutions into industry-standard Intel boxes," says Clariion's Abraham.

Analysts note that Clariion's MSA technology is a solid effort at satisfying current enterprise storage needs for flexibility. "Today's storage-centric applications require tailored storage pools that can be easily scaled," says Robert Gray, International Data Corp. (Framingham, Mass.) analyst. "Clariion fibre channel disk arrays, offering an advanced Multidimensional Storage Architecture, meet these needs and are easily adaptable to future requirements."

In addition to the FC5000 series, Clariion also announced a fibre channel upgrade path for its SCSI-based Series 3000 Disk Arrays that enable current Clariion users to upgrade to a fibre channel host-to-subsystem link, while retaining the SCSI disks within the array.

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