Unisys Corp has tailored one of its mainframe lines – 2200 presumably, although it carefully says only that the machine is made in CMOS – to create the DataCentral enterprise database server, a key aim being to rebuild its base in the airline business, where IBM Corp mainframes have been eating away at its market share. The DataCentral is designed to support concurrent high-volume transaction processing and real-time query processing against the same database while maintaining a consistent transaction response time. First application for the thing is the Unisys Customer Management System for airlines which ships in the fourth quarter. The DataCentral is out in the second half, and is designed to access databases on IBM Corp mainframes, Digital Equipment Corp minis and Unix and NT machines as well as with Unisys mainframes; it supports Macintosh, Windows, Unix workstation and Windows NT desktop clients. The DataCentral software environment conforms to the X/Open Co Ltd Distributed Transaction Processing model. It costs between $500,000 and $1m.
