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Data General ships first Intel based 32-processor ccNUMA to Sainsbury
London, 04 November 97
Data General has shipped a 32-processor AViiON AV 20000 ccNUMA server to retailer Sainsbury's. This represents the industry's first shipment of a 32-processor ccNUMA system based on the Intel architecture. Sainsbury's is using their two AV 20000 servers for a data warehousing application based on the Oracle database. This multi Terabyte data warehouse stores information about Sainsbury's customers collected at the point of sale through their loyalty card programme.
The AV 20000 is Data General's second generation ccNUMA system. In initial offerings, the AV 20000 can support up to 32 200 MHz Pentium Pro processors with optional 1 Megabyte L2 cache, 32 Gigabyte of memory, and 100 Terabytes of fault-tolerant CLARiiON fibre channel storage. In clustered configurations, the processor count grows to 128. Future systems will continue to leverage the Intel technology roadmap and the ccNUMA architecture which can scale to hundreds of processors.
According to performance scalability acceptance tests the 32-processor system scalability averages 92%. The AV 20000 has demonstrated similar scaling in other benchmarks using actual customer applications. With this system, Sainsbury's will analyze information collected from its customer loyalty card programme to develop merchandising programmes to attract and retain more customers.
Sainsbury uses a CLARiiON disk farm with over one Terabyte of data storage initially, but expects the system to grow quickly to three Terabytes. Up to 300 business users will interrogate the warehouse using a mix of tools, including BRANN Viper and Information Advantage, depending on the nature of the queries.
Sandra Wermer
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