Jeff gave an overview of his presentation. The background portion was a history of computer developments with an emphasis on points of discontinuity where the rate of change was became rapid at times where technologies changed in kind, not just in capacity. The main portion was to be a description of DG's Intel-based "AViiON" server family, the "CLARiiON" high availability disk storage system, and the focus of the "new, changed" Data General on service and people, not just technology.
The background story Jeff told was illustrated with time-series graphics showing the performance of computer systems going back over 30 years.
The IBM mainframes of the 1960's, including the 1401, the 360 and 370 family were linear improvements in the basic technology of transistor- based CPUs.
With the introduction of the integrated circuit at the end of the 1960's, there was a discontinuity in the time-performance curve. ICs allowed the production of minicomputers on one ciruit board. Thus, DEC and Data General were able to produce minicomputers, most prominently the PDP-11 and VAX from DEC and the NOVA and Eclipse from DG. IBM, focussed on their mainframe gold mine, lagged in similar developments, giving the start-ups time to become significant in the new market.
A similar story occured at the end of the 1970's when microprocessors became large enough to compete with part of the minicomputer market. While DEC focussed on incremental development of the VAX into the microVAX (which was based on powerful ICs but had no microprocessor as such), SUN created the first popular workstations based on the Motorola 68000 -- and walked off with the new market.
(Jeff paused from one of a number of price/performance charts to note wryly that "software does not improve exponentially - but that is not our subject for the evening.")
Data General's AViiON servers, since 1988, have had a Symetric-Multiprocessing (SMP) architecture using the 88000 series CPUs from Motorola. By 1993, the 88110 and 88120 were not giving the price/performance to stay "on the curve". (Jeff used the term "Chip Death", meaning "an architecture is running out of steam".)
At this point, the DG brass held a future strategy meeting and came to three conclusions:
Jeff claimed that these SHV boards would bring about another discontinuity in the price/performance curves, a quantum leap compared to the gradual improvement in RISC microprocessor servers of the last few years. Therefore, DG is producing its new line of AViiON servers based on these boards from Intel.
The new line will work with Windows NT as its operating system, as well as not giving up on DG/UX.
Jeff went on to describe the CLARiiON line of RAID disk arrays. They will provide clustering and connection techniques so that the overall server will have no single point of failure. They will come in 7, 10, and even 20 slot array boxes. By April, 1996, 8GB disks should be available for the slots, and since up to four boxes can be stacked, a maximum of over 500 GB of storage should be available with them.
(I'm afraid my notes become more fragmentary at this point as Jeff reeled off a large number of descriptions of DG's services and strategies. I will have to revert to brief point-form. -Ed.)