Data General AViiON
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The AViiON were a series of Unix-based NUMA multiprocessor computers from Data General, which were the company's main product in the late 1980s and early-mid 90s. The name AViiON came from modifying the name NOVA ii and spelling it backwards, the result of a company competition to find a name for the new machines. Earlier AViiON models used the Motorola 88000 CPU, but later models moved to an all-Intel solution when Motorola stopped work on the 88000 in the early 1990s. In 1999 Data General was bought out by EMC for their CLARiiON disk systems, and the AViiON line disappeared.
Data General had, for most of its history, been based on following DEC and producing a version of DEC's latest minicomputer machinery with a better price/performance ratio. However by the 1980s this was a pointless exercise, both were being undercut by workstations and even microcomputers that offered far better price/performance ratios. Realizing this, DG decided to stop attempting to follow the dying DEC market, and instead strike out on their own with an entirely new architecture.
DG found a niche they felt would be sustainable: workgroup sized systems with the individual performance of a workstation, but the centralized administration of a minicomputer. They also realized that any attempt to create their own central processing unit was doomed to be outperformed within a short period due to the rapidly increasing microprocessor speeds, so in order to outperform the workstation vendors they would have to do so using the same equipment.
The result was the AViiON series of NUMA systems, which offered the performance needed by adding multiple CPUs to a single system. Machines were released at a variety of sizes, from single-processor desktop units in pizza box and midtower designs, to larger desk-side and roller-mounted multiprocessor systems. The first systems in the series were released in the summer of 1989, followed by a series of speed-bumped versions over the next few years. All of these systems ran a version of System V Unix written for them by SCO, known as DG/UX, to which they added NUMA support.
In 1992 Motorola joined the AIM alliance to develop "cut down" versions of the IBM POWER CPU design into a single-chip CPU for desktop machines. They also stopped development on the 88000 at the same time. DG at this point gave up working with Motorola, and decided instead to go "all commodity", and use i386 based CPUs from Intel instead. This resulted in a second series of machines based first on the Pentium Pro, and later on faster Pentium II and Pentium III Xeon CPUs.
Eventually this "all commodity" approach led them to port their NUMA software to Windows NT as well, and for a while Data General became fairly well known as a multiprocessor NT vendor. However in the late 1990s DG found itself increasingly unable to differentiate itself from systems consisting of multiple "standard" machines hooked together, and sales slowed.
In 1999 EMC purchased the company for 1.2 billion dollars, in order to gain access to their CLARiiON line of disk servers. Part of the agreement was that the AViiON line would not be spun off into a separate company, so instead they simply cancelled them outright and the AViiON disappeared.
External links
- The m88k Resource: Data General AViiON) (http://badabada.org/aviion.html)
- Data General AViiON information (http://www.ninthwonder.com/~briggs/aviion/)