Hitachi Ltd has followed Tandem Computers Inc in using the voting system of fault-tolerance for its first shot at a fault-tolerant Unix machine. The new Hitac FT-6100 uses three 68040s – but unlike the Tandem Integrity S-2 machine, it can also be used as a non-fault-tolerant multiprocessor. The company has gone back into the past for Unix, using its System III-based HI-UX, with real-time, fault-tolerant and interactive multiprocessing functions added. Oracle Version 6.0 is offered as the relational database. Communications supported include TCP/IP and Network File System plus Hitachi’s HDLC implementation of SDLC, and Ethernet-compliant CD-105 and FDDI local networks. Pricing starts at a daunting $1.13m, with deliveries starting January.
