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Message Posted: Tue, 13 Nov 2001 @ 15:56:26 GMT

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I just had one more quick thought,

Someone brought up AIX as an option, I don't know that NCR *could* consider that, I haven't read much lately, but isn't SP2 on AIX? I don't know if IBM would want it's main competition for Unix based, Parallel databases to run on the same OS as it does. It may be considered a feather in IBM's collective hat if NCR did, but I think there would be a bit too much rivalry for the partnership to work out.

As I've stated before, I don't know where NCR should go here, I've got my opinions, and I have a few options in my mind, all of which are sensible to me, but I don't know what is driving NCR right now. One can always say money is the main motivator, but is it at this point? They are discarding a large part of their overhead in getting rid of OS development, and they are really getting down to the business that they see as a moneymaker, Teradata. Heck, I could see NCR just selling the software and bynet setups and merely doing verification of systems that you could run it on. REally, that's more or less what happens now, we buy "NCR" hardware, but it is made by Selectron, who also makes the Compaq, HP, and other brand name Intel server racks that I see. The NCR hardware is more vanilla than those other systems, I could run just about any Intel OS on the NCR stuff, whereas with Compaq, HP, etc., I need certain drivers and such for on board chipsets and such. In this, NCR is merely putting together a very vanilla Intel system and more or less verifying that it is sufficient (given the proper amount of RAID behind it) to run teradata and scale up. They could do this with nearly any platform, from what I can see, the parts that make the hardware so usable, the CMICS, the other management pieces, etc., are all external to the CPU boxes, and some of them are pretty standard KVMs, or console repeaters. If NCR were to put out a Hardware Compatability list with a certified structure as to *how* you have to build the system, I think I could build the same system, and possibly hunt prices for my CPUs a little better. Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I've opened up enough of the 3xxx-5xxx nodes to know what the innards look like, and I've torn apart enough of the competition to see a good comparison. I'm just blue-skyin' here, but this is the approach Sun has taken with it's X86 Solaris release, because they know that they don't want to sell Intel hardware, but the X86 port sure gets people hooked on Solaris.

Thanks again for listening,

loadc

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