Sequent Extends NUMA-Q Server Family - Offers Leading UNIX Midrange Price/Performance and Windows NT Capability

NUMA-Q 1000 four and eight processor Intel Pentium II Xeon-based servers target data marts, packaged apps and pilot programs for large-scale systems

SAN DIEGO, Ca.—January 26, 1999—Sequent Computer Systems, Inc., the leader in Intel-based data center solutions, today introduced new midrange servers to its performance leading NUMA-Q™ product line. The NUMA-Q 1000 series brings leading price/performance to the UNIX midrange server market and Windows NT capability. NUMA-Q 1000, launched today at the Sequent User Resource Forum's Enterprise Solutions Summit, is an ideal platform for dependent data marts, packaged applications and pilot programs for large scale data center systems.

The NUMA-Q 1000 series includes four and eight way Intel PentiumŪ II Xeon™ processor-based servers optimized for UNIX price/performance and uniquely re-deployable running Windows NT. NUMA-Q 1000 combines the leading performance, availability and manageability of the breakthrough NUMA-Q 2000 series with aggressive pricing for the UNIX midrange market.

"NUMA-Q 1000 is a highly competitive server that provides an entry level to the most scalable and performant UNIX architecture designed for commercial applications," said Jeff Pancottine, vice president of global marketing for Sequent. "These are cost-effective, data center-ready systems offering true investment protection. An enterprise-wide application that expands and requires scalability beyond eight processors can be moved without any additional tuning to a NUMA-Q 2000 server that offers scalability to 64 processors. NUMA-Q 1000 can then be re-deployed running either UNIX or Windows NT."

The NUMA-Q 1000 shares the same Intel-based architecture, multi-pathing UNIX operating system, peripherals, clusters and layered software as NUMA-Q 2000. Applications in pilot testing or development can be redeployed on the high-end platform without additional tuning. High-end architectures from other major vendors can differ significantly from their midrange products and often require more complex upgrades to the high-end systems. Once redeployed to the NUMA-Q 2000, applications developed or tuned for NUMA-Q 1000 can take advantage of scalability to 64 processors, 64 GB of main memory and tens of terabytes of storage.

Availability and Manageability

NUMA-Q 1000 offers both the high availability and manageability features required to deliver on aggressive user service level agreements.

High availability is supported through comprehensive redundant and hot-swappable components, multiple UNIX operating system paths between server and storage devices, dynamic load balancing to manage peak demand and Sequent's proven clustering technology.

Sequent also offers a single set of management and administration tools across its NUMA-Q 1000 and NUMA-Q 2000 platforms. For UNIX, Sequent's Application Region Manager™ partitioning software enables performance tuning, workload management and server consolidation. Many general system administrative procedures operate under one interface and console for both UNIX and Windows NT, including system booting, monitoring, diagnostics and remote service.

Pricing and Availability

NUMA-Q 1000 will be available for quantity shipments on March 15, 1999. Initially, Sequent is offering the following NUMA-Q 1000 configurations and list pricing:

System Processors Memory List Price
NUMA-Q 1000 4 Pentium II Xeon 400MHz/1MB (1Quad) 1 GB $93,583
NUMA-Q 1000 8 Pentium II Xeon 400MHz/1MB (2 Quads) 2 GB $188,683

NUMA-Q Architecture

Sequent introduced the industry's first commercial NUMA (non-uniform memory access) architecture, the NUMA-Q 2000 data center server, in late 1996. This next generation Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) technology enabled greater flexibility for system processor and memory resource allocation and significant gains in performance scalability over large numbers of processors.

In 1999, Sequent posted leading industry standard benchmarks for both data warehouse query workloads (TPC-D) and online transaction processing performance (TPC-C) with its NUMA-Q architecture in a NUMACenter™ configuration featuring Windows NT application servers and UNIX database servers in a single system. Sequent is currently in production deployment of its second-generation NUMA-Q systems. Every major server system vendor has announced plans for its first NUMA or NUMA-like systems.

About Sequent Computer Systems, Inc.

Sequent Computer Systems (Nasdaq:SQNT), the leader in Intel-based solutions for the data center, is committed to the success of its end-user and system integrator customers. Sequent's platform architectures and services are optimized for the scalability, availability and manageability requirements of corporate and institutional data center environments leveraging industry-standard technologies and best-in-class partnerships.

Sequent supports more than 10,000 installations worldwide, including many of the world's largest and most sophisticated OLTP, DSS and RDBMS applications. For further information, phone Sequent at (503) 626-5700 or (800) 257-9044, or visit our Web site at www.sequent.com.