Cray/Media:       Mardi Larson, 612/683-3538
Informix/Media:   Cecelia Denny, 415/926-6420

CRAY RESEARCH SUPERSERVERS AND INFORMIX
SOFTWARE ANNOUNCE JOINT EFFORT TO SUPPORT VERY
LARGE DATABASES (VLDB)

PHOENIX, Ariz., Nov. 1, 1994 -- At the Data Warehousing
Conference today, Informix Software and Cray Research
Superservers, a subsidiary of Cray Research, Inc., announced
that they will work together to provide very large database
(VLDB) scalability with Informix(tm)-OnLine Dynamic Server
7.10 and the CRAY SUPERSERVER 6400 (CS6400) system. 
OnLine Dynamic Server 7.10 is expected to be available for the
CS6400 system by year end, 1994.

To support this effort, a CS6400 system has been installed at
Informix headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., and will be used by
Informix quality assurance staff to test OnLine Dynamic Server
7.10 and its scalability enhancements.  The CS6400 system,
offered with up to 64 SuperSPARC Plus microprocessors, is the
most scalable UNIX-based symmetric multiprocessing (SMP)
server on the market today.  This Cray Research system will
facilitate rigorous testing of the enhanced scalability features
of OnLine Dynamic Server 7.10.  Planned testing will
encompass single and multiple instances of Online server
querying very large databases.  The goal of the joint effort is
to support customer databases in the hundreds of gigabytes
range, the companies said.

"With Online Dynamic Server's Dynamic Scalable
Architecture(tm) (DSA), Informix customers can manage very
large databases, without the performance and scalability
bottlenecks found in other RDBMS offerings," said Steve
Sommer, vice president of marketing at Informix.  "Cray's
CS6400 system, with up to 64 processors, offers the hardware
and operating system scalability necessary to support large
database requirements for data warehousing and enterprise
decision support applications as well as high-end OLTP
applications."  

"The CS6400 system uses proven SMP technology to deliver
highly scalable performance for very large database
deployments," said Jeff Pancottine, director of marketing at
Cray Research Superservers, Beaverton, Ore.  "OnLine Dynamic
Server provides a truly scalable database architecture and
online administrative tools that can take advantage of the
parallel processing features of the CS6400 system, providing
customers with mature open solutions today for VLDB
applications."

OnLine Dynamic Server is based on Informix's next-generation
multithreaded, parallel processing architecture, Dynamic
Scalable Architecture(tm) (DSA), according to Sommer.   DSA
incorporates Parallel Data Query (PDQ), a first-of-kind parallel
processing technology for open systems that breaks the
scalability barriers of previous UNIX(r) database architectures
unable to handle data volume loads of enterprisewide online
transaction processing (OLTP), batch and decision support
services (DSS) applications, Sommer said.  PDQ provides tens
to hundreds of times performance gains over conventional
databases because it breaks the long-running database
processing tasks into subtasks and then processes those tasks
in parallel, he said, noting that this approach maximizes the
delivered power of each central processing unit (CPU) in a
multiprocessor hardware system.

The CS6400 system began shipping in February 1994.  It has
been selected to run the United Kingdom census database,
International Monetary Fund (IMF) financial statistics, and
complex data work at Atlantic Richfield Co. (ARCO); Electricite
de France, the world's largest public utility; and the entire
business at Neighborhood Beverage, a start up bottling company
in Los Angeles.  This Cray Research system has set industry
records for systems of any kind on the audited Transaction
Processing Council (TPC)-B transaction processing benchmark
and on SPECrate92 benchmarks run to date, Pancottine said. 

The CS6400 system can be configured with up to 16 gigabytes
of shared memory, 64 I/O (input/output) channels and seven
terabytes of online disk storage.  The CS6400 system can run
Solaris applications.  

Informix Software is the leading supplier of high-performance,
parallel processing database technology for open systems.  The
company's database server (software) is the number one choice
of computer hardware manufacturers for publishing TPC
benchmarks for UNIX-based systems.  Informix products also
include application development tools for creating
client/server production applications, decision support
systems and ad-hoc query interfaces, and connectivity
software that allows information to be shared transparently
from PCs to mainframes within the corporate computing
environment.
 
Cray Research provides the leading high-performance
computing tools and services to help solve customers' most
challenging problems.  Data warehousing, decision support,
transaction processing and multimedia applications which
challenge current technologies are the targets for Cray
Research's new line of highly scalable CS6400 systems.

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