Alpha and oracle serve up very large memory [New Products]

Abstract

The Alphaserver 8400 enterprise server and Alphaserver 8200 departmental server use the 300-MHz Alpha 21164 chip, which can operate a t a billion instructions per second, according to Digital. The servers combine Alpha 64-bit architecture and very large memory capacity (up to 14 Gbytes). They offer a choice of PCI, XMI, and Futurebus+ buses. The AlphaServers have reliability and availability features such as OpenVMS clusters, hot swap disks, RAID, redundant power, ECC memory and data paths, fault management, and uninterruptible power system. They are available with Digital Unix or Open VMS operating systems. Digital also plans support for Windows NT. The Alphaserver 8200 features one to six processors and up to 6 Gbytes of memory. The base system costs $100,000. It includes one processor; power and packaging with a five-slot system bus for CPU, memory, and VO modules; 12 8 Mbytes of memory; an integrated VO module with SCSI and communication ports; a CDROM reader; and the OpenVMS or Digital Unix operating system. The Alphaserver 8400 features one to 12 processors and up to 14 Gbytes of memory. The base system, priced at $195,000, has the same basic configuration as the Alphaserver 8200 base system, but offers more expansion for additional CPU, memory, and VO connectivity, and twice the memory. T o support the AlphaServers, Oracle offers a very large memory option for its Oracle7 database. This option exploits the 64-bit Alpha architecture, Digital Unix, and the new server’s 14-Gbyte maximum main memory to allow a larger portion of the database to reside in memory. The option features two components: Large Systems Global Areas and Big Oracle Blocks. LSGAs are database buffer caches in excess of 2 Gbytes. According to Oracle, the LSGA is transparent to most applications, and application code does not have to be changed. BOBS support block sizes up to 32 Kbytes. Larger blocks allow more rows per block, meaning less overhead per row and fewer disk I/O requests when scanning tables, claims the company. Consequently, the database can move data from disk to memory and back much faster. Circle reader service number 23