Sequent Ships NUMA-Q 2000 Clustering Solution for High-Availability

First to Offer Full-Speed (100MB/Sec.) Fibre Channel NUMA Clustering; Enhanced Multi-path Storage Access, Adds Support for Memory-Intensive Applications and More Users

BEAVERTON, Ore. - June 30, 1997 - Sequent Computer Systems, Inc., the leader in high-end open systems, today announced significant hardware and software enhancements to its Data Center Ready NUMA-QTM 2000 servers, including the industry's first clustering solution for high availability of Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) systems.

Clustered NUMA-Q 2000 machines run multiple copies of the operating system to ensure that businesses can continue to function with little or no downtime in the event of failure or catastrophic damage to a single server. With this announcement, Sequent leaps out ahead of competitors with new Fibre Channel technology, as it is the only company to ship full-speed (100MB/sec.) Fibre Channel clustering connections between NUMA servers. Fiber Channel will allow clustered nodes to be spaced up to 10 kilometers apart, providing the ability to survive site disasters. Sequent also became the first NUMA systems vendor to integrate full-speed Fibre Channel/Arbitrated Loop, increasing system capacity, performance and availability beyond all current limits.

"EDS believes NUMA-Q 2000 is a breakthrough product that will enable us to accelerate our delivery of quality open systems, with state of the art technology, at improved price/performance. For the first time, we can consolidate various open systems platforms to deliver our traditional economies of scale within our service delivery infrastructure," said Bob Healy, chief technology officer for Technology Management at EDS.

"NUMA-Q 2000 is already delivering top performance to our customers and we're continuing to improve on our product, adding headroom and robustness never before seen in open systems," said Casey Powell, Sequent's chairman and CEO. "Corporations once looked upon Unix in the Data Center with a skeptical eye. Armed with Sequent's many years of implementation experience and the best-performing hardware platform available, more corporations are trusting their high-end, business-critical information to Sequent."

The latest system upgrade also lets customers scale NUMA-Q 2000 to 32 Intel Pentium® Pro microprocessors, or eight business-hardened quads. NUMA-Q utilizes Sequent's IQ-LinkTM, a revolutionary gallium arsenide data pump and high-speed interconnect, between quads. This enables companies to install as many as 252 processors-or up to 63 quads-in a single server for unprecedented computing power and scalability.

Other Enhancements Boost System Performance, Capacity and Availability

Sequent shipped other key upgrades to NUMA-Q 2000 on or ahead of schedule in the past month. These included enhanced storage performance, capacity and availability with the first shipping Fibre Channel/Arbitrated Loop (FC/AL) implementation on a NUMA platform. In addition, Sequent shipped Very Large Memory (VLM) of up to 16 GB per server, providing balanced, high-capacity capabilities to support large enterprise applications and thousands of concurrent users.

Sequent's high speed FC/AL, combined with Sequent's new multi-pathing capability in its DYNIX/ptx® operating system, provides multiple active paths to all storage devices. This combination protects access to mission-critical data without requiring data partitioning. In addition, each system is capable of hosting up to 32 Fibre Channel connections, supporting tens of terabytes of protected storage. NUMA-Q 2000 continues to support point-to-point Fibre Channel, as well as providing a Fibre Channel to SCSI bridge to connect existing SCSI devices. This bridge preserves customer investments in existing peripheral systems and provides an easy migration path to Fibre Channel-based storage fabrics, when available.

With VLM, companies can substantially improve the performance of memory-intensive applications, such as enterprise financial packages. The NUMA-Q 2000 VLM capability vastly increases the physical memory from 1GB to up to 4GB per quad, or up to 16GB per server, enabling system administrators to cache large amounts of database information. Many commercial applications require a fixed amount of physical memory per user in order to assure optimum response time. The additional memory headroom provided by VLM significantly increases the user population supportable by a single server for these enterprise applications. In addition, administrators are better able to plan for rapidly growing user communities with a simple memory upgrade.

About Sequent Computer Systems, Inc.

Sequent Computer Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: SQNT) is uniquely capable of delivering robust and scalable Data Center Ready open systems solutions that are guaranteed to perform. Sequent minimizes customers' risk, enabling implementation of complex business applications that support critical needs, based on the breakthrough Sequent NUMA-Q architecture, a comprehensive portfolio of proven migration services and offerings, and an established set of partnerships with the industry's best-in-class. For further information, phone Sequent at (503) 626-5700 or (800) 257-9044, or visit our World Wide Web site at http://www.sequent.com/.

Sequent and DYNIX/ptx are registered trademarks and NUMA-Q and IQ-Link are trademarks of Sequent Computer Systems, Inc. Intel and Pentium are registered trademarks of Intel Corp. All other products or company names mentioned are used for identification purposes only, and may be trademarks of their respective owners.