Compaq Computer Corp, Dell Computer Corp and Hewlett-Packard Co were the first systems vendors to announce support for Intel Corp’s Profusion chipset yesterday as the basis for eight-way servers. Compaq claimed to be a co-developer of the architecture, which grew out of original work done by Corollary Inc, an Irvine, California-based company acquired by Intel in 1997. It worked primarily on the I/O portions. Profusion development is still done at Irvine, although Intel supplemented the team with its own developers and by engineers that had worked on NCR Corp’s similar OctaScale technology (CI No 3,323).
Compaq said that two new eight-way servers, code-named Thunder and Lightning, will use Profusion, and announced a set of cluster management tools for its ProLiant clusters. Thunder is a fault-tolerant system with large internal storage capacity, based on the current ProLiant 7000. Lightning is the follow-on to the current ProLiant 6500.
Dell said it would broaden its line of enterprise servers to include eight-way systems this summer, while Hewlett-Packard, which already has eight-way systems using proprietary chipsets, said it would use Profusion in next-generation NetServer LXr 8500 systems.
Sequent Computer Systems Inc, which uses its own Numa architecture for multi-processing systems, said it was also likely to introduce a new line of low-end systems using Profusion. But Gateway Inc, which currently has dual-processor systems, said it was still considering any moves to offer higher-end standard servers.
