Compaq to go enterprise crazy next Tuesday

As a corollary to the re-organisation of its enterprise server division next week, reported here earlier, Compaq will also introduce a raft of products and initiatives Tuesday next. Senior Compaq VP Enrico Pesatori will start by announcing the re-org, and is likely to appoint Bill Heil, a vice president of the company, to head up the new, unified strategy intended to weld Digital, Tandem and Q products and sales teams closer together. Compaq would like to have introduced an eight way server based on Intel's Profusion technology next Tuesday, but it's going to have to wait until the 23rd, when Intel presses the "go" button on its long awaited SMP chipset. Other major vendors, including IBM and Dell, are likely to roll out similar products to coincide with the Intel Developer Forum at the end of the month. Further, sources very close to Q's plans, say that it will announce improvements (sorry enhancements) to its Nonstop Integrity XC cluster system with support for SCO's UnixWare 7 Release 7.1 and its own improved software. When you look at the material on Compaq's Web site, it makes you scratch your head, but essentially its Integrity stuff lets you link x.86-based and Unix boxes, of whatever variety, be they Alphas or whatever, together. That's how Compaq is likely to sell it, although major computer companies would rather attempt to befuddle us with jargon. Integrity XC is likely to scale up to 12 nodes and 48 PIII or PIII/Xeon chips, with price reductions and the ability to support fibre channel storage systems with up to 864Gb of clusterable storage. Its management software is likely to integrate with software from CA, HP, and IBM Tivoli. Q will sell Integrity XC on the basis that it believes it is the only company which can present multiple nodes on a network running flavours of Unix, as if it was a single SMP machine. The world+dog has waited for Intel's Profusion chipset to arrive, in a start-stop fashion, for around four years. Profusion technology was developed by a company called Corollary, which Intel took over as part of its symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) strategy. Pesatori, however, is unlikely to announce any job scaleability Tuesday. That will be a job for Mike Capellas, the new CEO who has taken over Eckhard Pfeiffer's mantle. Meanwhile folks whose hearts still sing when they hear the words Vax and Alpha have opened up a new Web site called Tru64, and are promosing a Linux64.org site too. ® Compaq to announce re-org Tuesday next