News
Unisys Wins Licensee for CMP
- By Scott Bekker
- January 26, 2000
Unisys Corp. is no longer the only vendor selling those 32-Intel-processor Cellular Multi-Processing (CMP) server systems that run Windows NT, Windows 2000, and/or UnixWare in partitions or across the whole box.
Unisys this month said it is licensing the technology to London-based global IT-service provider ICL, which will market the CMP servers under its own label. Unisys sells the boxes as the E-action ES7000. The deal is a step in Unisys’ plan to try to open more channels for sales of its CMP technology, which some analysts say is more than a year ahead of technology from other Intel-based hardware sellers.
Full-scale CMP systems carrying a full cabinet of 32 processors can accommodate up to 64 GB of memory and access 96 I/O channels. The technology provides each processor with its own access path to memory or I/O through a technique called crossbar switching.
The system is built up of 4-processor blocks that can be used to build different partitions, enabling a customer, for example, to run a production Windows NT environment in one partition, while testing Windows 2000 in another. When Intel releases its IA-64 processors, system administrators will be able to run 32-bit processors in one partition while running 64-bit processors in another partition on the same machine.
Contact Unisys, (215) 986-4011, www.unisys.com.
Contact ICL, 44 (0) 1753 53 23 23, www.icl.com.
About the Author
Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.