News

Microsoft, Unisys, EMC Say W2K Scales to Data Center

• By Scott Bekker
• 11/15/1999

The solution is designed for e-commerce infrastructures, for Internet start-ups as well as brick and mortar companies that are planning to open up shop on the Web.

The data center includes a 9 TB data warehouse, is capable of 4,000 transaction per minute, can handle 3 billion hits a day and can backup data at 1.2 TB an hour.

According to Larry Weinbach, the CEO of Unisys, the latest research done by his company indicates that the largest e-commerce sites currently run approximately 55 million transactions a day.

"What we’ve been able to do is take Windows 2000 and prove today at Comdex that it is scaleable," he says.

Unisys also demonstrated a 50 million object Active Directory, stating that it does scale beyond the industry perception 10 million object limit.

To achieve this scalability the data center network demonstrated here consisted of 52 Unisys e-@action Enterprise servers, six Symmetrix Enterprise Storage systems from EMC, EMC Connectrix Enterprise Storage Network system, EDM and EMC TimeFinder software, also from EMC. The grand total storage capacity of the solution is 43 TB.

Mike Ruettgers, president and CEO of EMC, says that the companies expect people to ask if 43 TB of storage is overkill.

"EMC has a number of dot-com companies that have more than 43 TB of storage today," he says.

The companies claim that the solution as it was demonstrated today is capable of 99.99 percent uptime, based on Unisys ES5000 servers.

Unisys’ Weinbach said that in the first quarter of next year the company will enhance that product line with the ES7000 server. At that time, Unisys expects the availability of this data center solution to reach 99.9998 percent.

A White Paper by market consultancy The Aberdeen Group Inc. (www.aberdeen.com) says that the Unisys-Microsoft solution will be useful for scaling up current NT implementations that need substantial headroom, for providing data centers or application servers for midsize to large organizations that do not require Unix or mainframes, and for the rapid building of e-commerce applications.

Other partners involved in the announcement include Intel Corp., Cisco Systems Inc., Giganet Inc. (www.giganet.com), Imation Corp. (www.imation.com), Mercury Interactive Corp. (www.merc-int.com), NetIQ Corp. (www.netiq.com), StorageTek Corp. (www.storagetek.com) and QLogic Corp. (www.qlc.com). – Thomas Sullivan