Data General (DG) had, for most of its history, essentially mirrored the strategy of
DEC with a competitive (but, in the spirit of the time, incompatible)
minicomputer with a better
price/performance ratio. However, by the 1980s, Data General was clearly in a downward spiral relative to DEC. With the performance of custom-designed minicomputer
CPU's dropping relative to commodity microprocessors, the cost of developing a custom solution no longer paid for itself. A better solution was to use these same commodity processors, but put them together in such a way to offer better performance than a commodity machine could offer. By 1989
Unix RISC workstations from
Sun Microsystems and others increasingly lured customers from DG and DEC. With Aviion, introduced that year, DG shifted its sight from a purely proprietary minicomputer line to the burgeoning Unix server market. The new line was based around the
Motorola 88000, a high performance RISC processor with some support for
multiprocessing and a particularly clean architecture. The machines ran a
System V Unix variant known as
DG/UX, largely developed at the company's
Research Triangle Park facility. DG/UX had previously run on the company's family of
Eclipse MV 32-bit minicomputers (the successors to Nova and the 16-bit
Eclipse minis) but only in a very secondary role to the Eclipse MV mainstay
AOS/VS and
AOS/VS II operating systems. Also, some Aviion servers from this era ran the proprietary
Meditech MAGIC operating system. From February 1988 to October 1990,
Robert E. Cousins was the Department Manager for workstation development. During this time they produced the Maverick project and several follow-ons including the 300, 310 and 400 series workstations along with the 4000 series servers. Aviion were released in a variety of sizes beginning in the summer of 1989. They debuted as a
pizza box workstation (codenamed "Maverick") and a server in both roller-mounted and rackmount flavors ("Topgun"). Speed-bumped and scaled-up versions followed, culminating in, first, the 16-CPU
AV/9500 server and then the up to 32-way
AV 10000 server in 1995, DG's first implementation of a
Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) design. Workstations remained part of the line for a time, but the emphasis increasingly shifted towards servers. 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, and eventually stopped further development of the 88000. Because of this, DG gave up working with Motorola, and decided instead to align its efforts with what was soon to become the clear winner in volume microprocessors, and used
i386 architecture CPUs from Intel instead. This resulted in a second series of Aviion machines based first on the
Pentium, and later on faster
Pentium Pro,
Pentium II and
Pentium III Xeon CPUs. This more commoditized hardware approach also led DG to develop NUMA servers that added a memory-coherent interconnect (
Scalable Coherent Interconnect (SCI)) to "standard high-volume" x86 motherboards sourced from Intel.
Sequent Computer Systems, now part of
IBM, was following a similar strategy at the time. A system codenamed "Manx" was an earlier NUMA effort based on the original Pentium and Zenith hardware, but it was never brought to market. The
AV 20000 ("Audubon") connected to 32 Pentium Pro processors (on up to eight quad-processor building blocks) in this manner; the later
AV 25000 ("Audubon 2") upgrade expanded this to 64 Pentium II (later Pentium III) Xeons. Based on the burgeoning popularity of Windows NT, Intel-based Aviion servers also added
Windows to their OS roster across the Aviion x86 line. It ended up contributing a significant percentage of revenues at the low-end, especially among existing DG customers who had made a decision to switch to NT. However, at the high-end, although Windows NT could run efficiently on single-block (i.e. quad-processor) building blocks in NUMA servers, it did not at the time have the
processor and memory affinity optimizations that are required to achieve high performance on larger systems. As a result, Windows on DG NUMA servers was always more of a marketing story than a technical reality. Around the same time, DG was also aggressively working towards an "industry standard" Unix operating system with the
Santa Cruz Operation and others. However, first with SCO's Data Center Acceleration Program (DCAP), and then
Project Monterey, this never came to pass. Ultimately, DG's NUMA servers ended up as just another large-scale proprietary Unix server at a time when the industry was coalescing around the Unix platform variants of just a few large vendors —
Compaq (later acquired by HP),
HP,
IBM, and
Sun Microsystems. In 1999,
EMC purchased Data General for 1.2 billion dollars primarily to gain access to its
CLARiiON line of disk array storage products and associated software. Under the terms of the "pooling of interests merger," EMC maintained the server line for two years, but discontinued it as soon as the terms of the deal allowed, at which point Aviion disappeared. ==Notes==