InformationWeek

SKYLINE ON HORIZON

Hitachi's fast mainframe whets users' appetites

By Sana Siwolop
Issue date: Sept. 25, 1995

In terms of sheer power, the fastest mainframe on the market is the Skyline from Hitachi Data Systems. Unveiled in April, Skyline hasn't started shipping yet. Nonetheless, it's already sold out for the last quarter of this year, and supply is "very tight" for the first half of 1996, according to Bill Tudor, Hitachi's director of Skyline marketing.

Because the new mainframe combines ECL (emitter-coupled logic) and CMOS circuitry on the same high-density chip, it offers both the performance might of the former technology a nd the cost benefits of the latter. Thanks to its uniprocessor speed of 124 MIPS, Skyline operates twice as fast as the fastest available mainframes, Hitachi claims.

Lots of Perks
But that, apparently, is just one of Skyline's many perks. Hitachi says the machine has 50% more storage capacity than the 12-way mainframe Amdahl wheeled out last year. Skyline also requires only a third of the floor space needed by high-end mainframes and can reduce the cost of both powering and cooling a mainframe by more than 70%. In a multi-engine format, Skyline can run as fast as 780 MIPS, depending on application workload, operating system, and software and hardware configurations, Hitachi says.

So who needs Hitachi's turbo wonder? Customers are buying the machine for a number of reasons, but many have multiple-system imaging requirements that are at the low end, in the range of 500 to 600 MIPS. Often, the workloads of these customers are complex and time-sensitive and can't be reasonably divided.

As for IBM's Parallel Sysplex parallel processing technology, which couples mainframes to share data and balance workload: "It's just not mature enough," Tudor says.

A typical Skyline customer might have a computer system where 25,000 travel agents are simultaneously accessing an airline reservations system, or where 30,000 users are tracking overnight package deliveries.

For those customers who need the horsepower, the multimillion dollar price tag hasn't been a deterrent. The average price is $20 million, Tudor says. Hitachi's Skyline has already generated positive response among customers, so much so that Hitachi has, in some cases, been able to command a 10% to 15% higher price per MIPS with the product, says Charles Burns, mainframe research analyst at Gartner Group Inc. in Stamford, Conn.

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