Compaq unleashes the AlphaServer
As part of its aggressive Non-Stop e-Business Solution initiative, Compaq has developed a series of powerful new servers. Designed to be the engine driving worldwide e-commerce transactions (estimated by some to climb from $218 billion today to $2.5 trillion in 2002), the AlphaServer GS series supports Tru64 Unix and OpenVMS operating systems.
Configured for expansion, the AlphaServer series is modular--with eight-, 16- and 32-processor systems--and engineered to support future-generation processors. The Alpha series is ready to ship now, but more than 125 systems are deployed within Compaq, with 70 years of cumulative run time.
Dave Fenwick, Compaq's lead engineer on the project, says nearly 2 million batch jobs have been run to date, and Compaq has applied for some 50 patents. Great care has been taken to essentially eliminate unscheduled downtime by avoiding single points of failure through redundancy, operating system hardening and full system-level redundancy. Scheduled downtime has been addressed through online maintenance and upgrades for software and (previously installed) hardware, thereby approaching the "boot once" goal.
Fenwick anticipates advances in technology over the life of the server will increase its performance by a factor of 20.