Compagnie des Machines Bull SA duly announced the extension of its OEM agreement with IBM Corp yesterday (CI No 3,273), taking the agreement through to 2002, and launched its high-end 64-bit Escala RL servers, based on IBM’s Raven RS/6000 servers. The IBM agreement originally focused on joint development of the Pegasus SMP symmetrical multiprocessing technology, but now it has been extended to cover a newer generation of SMP, supporting up to eight processors in more efficient configurations. It also covers extensions to IBM’s AIX Unix in the areas of security, scalability and Internet. And the two have begun developing common support for cc-NUMA non-uniform memory architecture systems within AIX. Bull started on this work up to two years ago, but IBM has now decided to join in. Bull says it expects to launch its first ccNUMA machines in the second half of 1998. Its current four-way, and future eight-way SMP boards will be used as building blocks for the 16-to-32 processor ccNUMA boxes, which will use the same version of AIX as the rest of the Escala range. Bull says its new Escala RL systems double the performance of its current high-end Escala, and add such things as Tuxedo transaction processing support, fiber channel linked disaster recovery and its Sagister enterprise management software to differentiate itself from IBM’s offerings. The new Escala RL use IBM’s RS64 64-bit CPU, developed by IBM’s AS/400 division. IBM itself abandoned the PowerPC 620, which Bull is still using in the rest of its Escala line under its agreement with Motorola Inc. Both types of systems will be able to participate in clustered configurations, Bull says, a strategy which offers PowerPC 620 customers an upgrade path.
