Hitachi Regains Iron Peak

Hitachi Data Systems' new Skyline Trinium Nine mainframes, unveiled last week, once again redefine the big in big iron.
The System 390-compatible servers can support as many as 16 processors, each one capable of crunching 262 MIPS, delivering a combined performance of more than 3,000 MIPS. That's roughly twice the peak 1,600 MIPS delivered on IBM's highest-end Generation 6 mainframes.
Not many companies require even close to that kind of horsepower, said Mike Chuba, an analyst at Gartner Group Inc. in Stamford, Conn.
"It is aimed at only about the top 5% of the S/390 market, which also happens to be the most lucrative and fastest-growing" mainframe segment, Chuba said.
Such systems are likely to be used primarily in Fortune 100 companies that are ramping up legacy applications and infrastructures to keep pace with business growth, Chuba added.
The new systems "will basically complement our existing capacity," said John Sommerfield, corporate communications director at San Francisco-based Charles Schwab & Co., which plans to buy one of the new systems.
Schwab's mainframes host much of the data and perform all the back-end processing that powers the company's regular and online trading activities. With more than 200,000 transactions processed each day, "the need for (processing) capacity is enormous," Sommerfield said.
Other companies that have already signed up to buy the systems include Aetna Health & Life Insurance Co., Hongkong and Shanghai Bank and Telcel, a telecommunications company in Mexico, according to Hitachi, which is based in Santa Clara, Calif.
Like earlier models, the Trinium Nines are based on hybrid processors that combine the low power consumption and floor-space savings of CMOS technology with the speed of the older emitter-coupled logic designs.
The systems feature Hitachi's Virtual Server Facility, which allows administrators to slice a single server into as many as 15 unique partitions, each of which can run different applications. The feature allows software vendors to base license charges on just the portion of the mainframe on which their product is running, rather than on the overall capacity of the system, thereby lowering costs for users.
The Trinium Nine Series was scheduled for shipment last fall, but problems limited Hitachi to releasing a 12-processor version that didn't leapfrog IBM's machines enough to provide a compelling alternative, said Carl Greiner, an analyst at Meta Group Inc. in Stamford, Conn.
As a result, Hitachi's 1999 sales were "absolutely terrible," Greiner said. Hitachi had a 21% share of the mainframe market in 1997, dropped back to 14% in 1998 and did worse last year, accordingto Greiner. Hitachi "almost fell off the map in '99. IBM went after them, and they couldn't hold their own. Now they've got a big banger out there again," he said.
Mainframe vendors typically don't publish prices, but Greiner said Meta Group has seen Trinium Nine bids ranging from $1,700 to $2,000 per MIPS.