Sequent, EMC, Intel & Oracle Partner on Data Center 10.14.97 ACTION ITEMS D S *
Beaverton, OR -- As reported by Jacqueline Emigh for Newsbytes, Sequent, EMC, Intel and Oracle officials announced an alliance around "the next-generation data center," to center on a nationwide symposium series.
"Corporations are making major decisions based on 20 percent of (corporate) information," contended Don Lee, moderator of the upcoming symposium, speaking during a teleconference, which was attended by Newsbytes.
Instead of being housed, as it should be, in corporate data centers, the bulk of companies' information is now "locked up in laptops" and other difficult to access places, according to Lee, who is life president of the IBM Users Group, and also former chief information officer (CIO) for Lloyd's of London.
Jeff Pancotitine, VP of marketing for Sequent, told the press that organization of and access to corporate data is becoming increasingly important, due to the "enormous impact of the number of users coming online" in recent years and months.
Sequent, EMC, Intel and Oracle have been collaborating on an infrastructure, already employed by clients like Oxford Health and Boeing, designed to bind disparate data types, provide adequate speed and architectural underpinnings in silicon, and "keep up with the exponential growth of the user base," according to Pancottine.
The infrastructure incorporates symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) technology from Intel; Sequent's implementation of Intel's Numa "quad" architecture; EMC's RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks) storage systems; and Oracle's Oracle 8 database and Network Computing Architecture (NCA), according to the officials.
Claude Wijmberly, director of enterprise marketing in Intel's Enterprise Server Group, noted that the Intel name is associated in most people's minds with PCs. But, he added, Intel is also very active elsewhere in the industry, experiencing "long and strong" relationships with companies like Sequent and Oracle, and "a newer but also very strong relationship with EMC."
Jeff Allen, EMC's VP of channels marketing, maintained that EMC has now reached a position of market dominance in both mainframe and "open systems" storage. EMC will support the endeavor with Internet connectivity, data back-up, and highly scalable information storage, according to Allen.
Oracle intends to help "maximize the benefit and minimize the risk" of corporate data storage with its parallel database and NCA, asserted Gary Bloom, Oracle's senior VP of worldwide alliances and technologies.
The symposium members expect that the discussions raised during the upcoming symposium series for information technology (IT) pros will benefit their other partners, as well as the industry as a whole, officials said during the teleconference.
"What we have is knowledge and experience," according to Pancottine. "The hope is that we can challenge the industry. I believe this (will be) the beginning of industry discussion."
The execs reported that the symposium will cover "disciplines of the data center" such as integration; scalability; workload management; applications; performance; capacity management; service levels; and high availability. Customer examples will be included, as well.
The symposium tour's first stops will include Washington, DC (October 28); New York City (October 30); Dallas (November 4); Chicago (November 6); and London, England (November 12). More stops will be announced at a later date.
Registration information is available on the World Wide Web at http://www.sequent.com/symposium