After playing catch-me-if-you-can for so long, it looks as if Sun Microsystems Inc is going to get only a month’s head start over the pack of Sparcsystem builders that will be gunning for its superscalar Sparcstation 10 market – if US firm Pinnacle Data Systems Inc, Columbus, Ohio, has its way. The midwest systems integrator, which specialises in servicing and supporting Sun workstations, looks set to inject some new life into the lacklustre compatible market, promising not only a true clone of Sun’s Sparcstation 10 workstation – within a month of Sun’s first superscalar deliveries – but also an intermediate Sparcstation 10 IPX system, an offering Sun is also thought to be mulling, and Sparcservers as well. What’s more, Pinnacle says it will deliver its Sparcstation 10 clone at around 65% of Sun’s list price, which would peg an entry-level machine with a 36MHz processor doing 86 MIPS, 44 SPECint92 and 53 SPECfp92 at around $12,000 – UKP9,600. Pinnacle says it will use an LSI Logic Corp superscalar board-set, incorporating the Texas Instruments Inc Viking part, and is shooting for initial deliveries to begin just weeks after Sun’s first shipments, which it expects in September. Pinnacle says copyright reasons forbid it from selling clones until Sun can get the real thing out of the door. Where it can, Pinnacle’s as yet unnamed box will match Sun’s workstation component for component, including memory, disk and screen. It has also signed deals with SunSoft Inc in the US and Europe for the Solaris 2.0 operating system and will become a Solaris support centre for the Sun subsidiary. Pinnacle, which currently offers a Sparc 2 CPU board, will build on its experience in the Sun spares, repair and trade-in hardware business – combined with the SunSoft deal – to launch itself in to the compatible market proper, backed by a hefty advertising campaign.
More interesting
Potentially more interesting is a machine Pinnacle is also readying which it says will fill the gap between Sun’s current Sparcstation 2 offering and the top-end Sparcstation 10. It will be a kind of Sparcstation 10 IPX offering – everything a Sparcstation 2 has, in the same footprint, but with a Viking CPU. Existing Sparcstation 2 users will be able to upgrade their systems via a board-swapout. Final configuration and pricing has yet to be finalised, the firm says, and it is still casting around for a name, although Series 200 has been mooted. Pinnacle also has plans for clones of Sun’s superscalar server range when that comes on stream towards the end of this year and the beginning of next. Just now Pinnacle is putting the finishing touches to deskside and rack-mount cabinet designs for that effort, it says. Again, the server systems will be out around a month after Sun’s own efforts – Pinnacle even believes Sun may stretch to an eight-way offering there. Pinnacle, a $40m-a-year outfit with 30 engineers, will sell direct in the US and via a sales agency it is employing. Pinnacle’s UK arm, Unix Solutions Ltd, a five-person start-up in Dunstable, Bedfordshire, is currently lining up distribution outlets in Germany, France and Switzerland. It will hold stock and spares and says it could get first machines as early as September from its US parent. Unix Solutions eyes Germany as potentially the biggest European market for initial sales of its clones. The firm says Sun is restricting the number of Sparcstation 10s that will be available over there to just 400 this year. Pinnacle also has a 5Gb RAID disk system ready to ship for Sparc 2 systems – it will be from UKP15,000.
