At UniForum next week, Compagnie des Machines Bull SA will be announcing a new unit within its Open Systems and Software division in order to try and win original equipment manufacturer contracts for its PowerPC-based Pegasus machines – particularly in the US where it is virtually unknown. The company will be targeting PowerOpen Association members; personal computer manufacturers moving to the PowerPC; former 88open members and Motorola Inc 68000 users. The new unit will have 12 staff spread across Austin and Boston offices. Bull will also establish a parallel organisation in Europe, but will sell Pegasus via other channels too, such as existing value-added resellers and its Zenith Data Systems division. The company says that it will price the boxes at least 10% lower than its nearest system rival. And when it begins shipping its PowerPC 601-based Pegasus machines in July, it will also announce phase two of its symmetric multiprocessing-based development work, code-named Mississippi. Mississippi is what Bull describes as a federation or cluster of multiple eight-way Pegasus machines, which will be based on PowerPC 620 processors. The systems will have shared memory, be connected via Bull’s own high-speed Interconnect System Link, and a single system image will be presented using Oracle Parallel Server. Mississippi will be targeted at the commercial mainframe market and will perform at up to 7,000 tps, competing with IBM’s own PowerParallel servers.
