David Pendery

Tremors are rippling through the high end of the server markets, with Hewlett-Packard Co. and Silicon Graphics Inc. set to square off with their most powerful NUMA machines, and Sequent Computer Systems announcing the imminent arrival of the second generation of its mixed-mode, Unix/Windows NT server environment.

Intel Corp.-based server hardware and software technology, as well as accompanying enterprise services, evolved rapidly last year, but 1999 and beyond appear to hold a bonanza of processing power, improved server I/O, broader architecture choices and service guarantees that will make Wintel servers ever more dependable and powerful.