Digital Equipment Corp will soon supplement its proprietary range of fault-tolerant machines with Alpha AXP machines running OSF/1 Unix. It has signed up Rome, Italy-based real-time and high-availability systems specialist Alenia SpA to manufacture and complete the design of the new Alphas, which are based on its VAXft fault-tolerant architecture. Alenia will also manufacture DEC’s family of three VAXfts, which comes in 11 configurations and runs OpenVMS. The newest member of this family is the VAXft 810, released last week at $175,000. This comes in at the top end, and performs 50% faster than the previous highest performer. DEC says the new Alphas can be used as general-purpose machines, but are targeted primarily at the telecommunications market as most customers here want Unix. And because they run OSF/1 E type, which has a System V.4 personality, users can run both OSF/1 and System V.4 applications on them. The fault-tolerant Alphas are rack-mountable and have two CPUs, each with mirrored memory ranging from 32Mb to 1Gb. They run at 125 SPECmarks, and come with up to 75.6Gb of shadowed storage, 16 interface boards, including Ethernet, SCSI, and FDDI, a CD-ROM load-device and support for two extra tapes. No pricing or availability dates were given.
